


seek ye the living

by charactershoes



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: (turns to the camera) this is a love story, F/M, Fleabag AU, M/M, no magic just repression, starring adam parrish as Hot Seminarian, starring noah as Boo (haha get it), the author is a lapsed catholic and Oh Baby you can tell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2020-12-28 01:29:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 39,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21128534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charactershoes/pseuds/charactershoes
Summary: Ronan says, “What’s the church’s stance on fratricide?”“Frowned upon,” says the almost-priest. He’s got a remote, orphan-eyed face like something off a prayer card, but his voice is as Henrietta as cicada song. “Although there’s precedent.”declan and ashley are getting married. ronan has a nosebleed and a crisis of faith, in that order.fleabag au





	1. i

**Author's Note:**

> tryna be casual but I've been writing this weird fic since august and it feels a little like I took it right outta my heart w a melon scooper. I hope you enjoy. 
> 
> general warnings: this fic will feature non-explicit references to child abuse and attempted suicide, just as the TRC series does. there will be more specific TWs at the beginning of chapters dealing w these topics. this chapter has some mentions of blood. 
> 
> one thing: while this fic is heavily steeped in catholicism and religion, this fic does not feature homophobia (internal or external) in any way. I don't want to write it and so I will not. Adam's repressed enough anyway

Afterwards, Ronan and the small ill-tempered waitress sit on the counter of the women’s restroom and pass a wad of toilet paper between them. Gansey stands outside the door and makes worried, ineffective noises of concern.

“Is he the type who won’t step foot in the ladies’ room?” asks the small ill-tempered waitress. 

“Just weird about blood,” Ronan says. He removes the wad of toilet paper from his nose, feels a string of warm blood roll down towards his lip. 

The waitress ducks into the stall, returns with two fresh fistfuls of tissue. Her split lip has mostly stopped bleeding, beginning to dry black with old blood. It suits her. 

“What exactly,” Gansey inquires from behind the door, “is the appropriate response to blood, then?”

They ignore him. Ronan accepts the waitress’ wad of tissue, watches the small miracle of his own blood seep through the scratchy paper. A shocking, scarlet confirmation that Ronan Lynch’s insides hold more than whistling caverns and wire. If you punch him in the face, does he not bleed? 

“Twenty-seven dollars for an appetizer, ” he says, “and single-ply fucking toilet paper.”

“Take it up with Nino,” says the small ill-tempered waitress. She spits in the sink consideringly, prods at her lip. “Everyone’s equal on the shitter, man.”

“Ronan,” Gansey says. His knuckles make a sound against the door, not quite a knock. “Let me drive you home. Everyone’s gone. Well, the priest is still here, but. Declan’s gone.”

“Not really a priest yet,” says a mild voice from behind the door. 

Ronan spits into the sink, examines the resulting glob of bloody saliva with interest. It’s sort of canine-shaped. Maybe a fox. 

“Ominous,” the waitress remarks, inspecting the bloodstain as if it were formed from tea leaves. She wiggles her fingers at Ronan in half-hearted mysticism. “You’ll meet your true love soon, probably. Or you’ll just require dental intervention.”

Ronan gives her the middle finger, but she ignores it because she is now rummaging under the sink, emerging with several rolls of toilet paper and a handful of breath mints. She offers a mint to Ronan, ducks her chin towards the stack of toilet paper.

“Help me carry these to my car?”

“Is the waitress in there?” Gansey asks. “Can you tell her we’re sorry? Declan tipped 100% on the bill, including the bottle of wine we smashed, so I imagine we made it worth her while-“

The waitress’ tongue pokes out to prod at the cut on her lip. It is a dangerous gesture. Ronan slides off the counter and starts gathering rolls of toilet tissue.

“Well you can tell your friend,” the waitress pitches her voice loud and sarcastic, marching for the door, “that _the waitress _thanks him ever so kindly, but he can keep his- his _hush money.”_

When she bursts through the door, Gansey’s face is a perfect mask of cartoon shock—eyes and mouth all perfect O’s.

“Hush money,” Gansey says. “Good God.” Then, eyes shifting sideways uncomfortably, “My apologies.”

The priest’s shoulder lifts, drops in lopsided indifference.

“If I offended you-” Gansey begins.

She hoots. “_If_?”

Ronan follows the waitress from the bathroom, bearing her stolen toilet paper, his throat hot and slick with swallowed blood.

They follow the waitress to her little shitbox of a car, covered in an adolescent rash of indignant bumper stickers. Ronan puts the stack of stolen toiletries into her trunk, which is already a whimsical trash heap of bicycle wheels, muck boots, baking sheets, tangled skeins of hideous yarn, a cracked crystal ball.

“Christ,” Ronan says, but the waitress is too busy yelling at Gansey about common decency and class warfare, and Gansey is too busy trying to shape his rich-asshole face into a shape that conveys his sympathy and also that he’s taken several women’s studies classes at his private university, and the priest only lifts a fair eyebrow like, _you rang_?

“Save me the _thou shalt not _lecture,” Ronan says.

“Not the lecturing type,” the priest says, shrugs.

“Oh,” Ronan sneers, “so you’re a Cool Priest?”

“Am I a cool priest?” he repeats, vaguely withering. His eyes flick up to Ronan’s face. “No, I’m a big reader with no friends. Are you a cool person?”

A twinge, then. The ghost of some old pain, of folding himself small in church and wondering—_what am I? _But it’s only a ghost. Ronan slams the waitress’ trunk.

“I’m a normal person,” he says.

“Normal,” the priest echoes. His lip curls. “I’m not a priest yet, anyway.”

There is a small, digging delight in the fact that the parish sent Declan a seminarian, a training-wheels priest. A sham-priest for Declan and Ashley to stand before while they make their sham-vows.

Ronan says, “What’s the church’s stance on fratricide?”

“Frowned upon,” says the sham-priest. He’s got a remote, orphan-eyed face like something off a prayer card, but his voice is as Henrietta as cicada song. “Although there’s precedent.”

“Anything else I can do for you, sir?” the waitress is demanding. She’s got her hands on her hips but there’s a real joy to her stance now, like she’s swapped some of her irritation for the exhilaration of a good fight. “Anything else I can do to make it _worth your while?_”

“Good Lord,” Gansey is saying. He shakes his head, retreats. “I’m going to stop talking now.”

They all have to scurry backwards to avoid the reckless arc of the waitress’s car as she reverses, pressing her middle finger to the window as she passes. Ronan laughs.

“Well, that’s delightful,” Gansey says tightly. “Ronan, let’s go. You can stay with me at Monmouth.”

It’s been six years since either boy lived in Monmouth Manufacturing, the impractical and whimsical warehouse that Gansey populated with stray boys and cereal box construction projects. Ronan’s roots are too deep in the Barns and Gansey is not a rooted thing at all and Noah is- Noah is gone now.

“Goodnight, father,” Gansey says. “Sorry for- _everything_.”

The sham-priest’s mouth twists, nearly a grimace. “Oh, that’s- Adam is fine.”

Ronan laughs again, tasting blood, feeling suddenly wretched and sore and regretful. He should’ve launched himself over the table, should’ve gotten his brother by the necktie, should’ve followed him out into the parking lot and-

“What’s funny?” Gansey inquires, a warning.

“Last name Parrish. First name _Adam_” Ronan says, because he’s hurting for a fight. His groping hands find his own half-done tie. “Is your middle name fucking Jesus?”

Gansey is long-suffering. He gathers up the breath to launch into his _sorry about Ronan he had a tough childhood _soliloquy, but the sham-priest exhales an empty kind of laugh.

“Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh,” he says, a dull recitation. His tone is friendly but his eyes are distant. He isn’t wearing a clerical collar, only a crucifix on a chain tucked below his shirt. Ronan can see its imprint. “Yeah, believe me, I’ve heard them all.”

He is sainted, half-lit in the shitty restaurant parking lot. He is untouchable in a way that makes Ronan understand why saints were always getting lit on fire or fed to lions or crushed beneath doors. He nearly chokes on his sudden desperation for _reaction_, to land some glancing blow, to examine Adam’s palms and side for signs of a wound.

He says the cruelest thing he can think of, “Formavit igitur Dominus Deus hominem de limo terræ.”

Adam only looks back at him, sharper, a thing formed from dust. His shoulder lifts, drops. “Et erant valde bona.”

Ronan’s nose begins to bleed again.

This is a love story.

…

This is a story of the Lynch brothers. Here they are at a table in the wood-paneled backroom of Nino’s, ordering twenty-seven dollar appetizers, not yet bleeding. A dark head, a shaved head, a blonde head. The small and ill-tempered waitress moves in and out of the room, refilling glasses of wine. They thank her without meeting her in the eyes.

Declan asks the not-quite-priest to lead them in grace and he assents coolly, eyes lowered.

Bless them, oh Lord, et cetera.

Here, smiling in polite bewilderment, bowing her head without closing her eyes, is the bride. She winks at the small and ill-tempered waitress like an actress breaking character on stage. She says “Amen” with the rest of them when the prayer is concluded.

“-ceremony will be in the church, of course,” Declan is saying, “and then back to the Barns for the reception. We had some problems with our contractor, but our event planner is very efficient and she swears it will be complete in time. Helen Gansey. I imagine you know the family-“

“It didn’t need fucking renovations.” This is the middle Lynch, not yet bleeding.

“Ronan’s the only one who still lives there,” Ashley tells the almost-priest, “with Matthew in college and Declan and I in DC, so you can imagine it’s not exactly in its glory days. It’s very- _quaint_.”

Here is Richard Gansey III, ducking in late, laying a hand on Ronan’s rigid shoulder just in time. He is very good at arriving right when he is needed, and no sooner. He apologizes to the waitress as he asks for another table setting—“Thanks _very _much… Jane, is it?”

“It is not,” she says, ill-tempered, although her embroidered nametag reads to the contrary.

The seminarian, after studiedly avoiding every personal question lobbed his way, is bullied into admitting he studied Classical Humanities before entering the seminary.

“Like Latin and Greek?” Gansey’s polite interest flickers into sincerity. “Ronan speaks Latin, you know.”

“Nobody _speaks_ Latin, Dick.”

Matthew, not yet twenty-one, trades his water for Ronan’s glass of wine. It takes about three sips to set his Irish complexion blazing red. He is blissfully unbothered at the prospect of his best man’s speech, which he has not yet written.

“It will come to me,” he says to Declan, who shreds a dinner roll and gestures to the waitress for another bottle of wine.

Ashley is showing pictures on her cellphone to the priest—“And here’s what it’ll look like _after _we tear down the wall. It’s _very _rustic, but I guess that’s the trend right now. _One_ celebrity gets married on a plantation and suddenly rural poverty is, like, trending on Pinterest. And let me show you my dress. Here’s—_whoops_, that one’s for spousal eyes only—“

Ronan steals his wine back from Matthew, drains it. The waitress returns with a new bottle, presents it to Declan for his approval. Ashley scrolls.

“_Here _it is. It’s a really cute idea. You’ll love this. We took Declan’s mother’s wedding dress and just tore it all up, put it back together—“

“Ronan,” says Gansey, a warning.

This is a story of the Lynch brothers—and so violence ensues. Furious bodies are flung across tables. A Lynch brother staggers backwards. An unidentifiable Lynch limb connects with the ill-tempered waitress, expensive bottle of wine striking her lip and then the floor.

…

Afterwards, the bride-to-be passes her fiancee handfuls of napkin from the glovebox and says, “We don’t have to invite him, you know.”

The eldest Lynch brother bleeds from his eyebrow, shakes his head.

“He’s my brother.” He says it like it means something different. When they pull down the long gravel drive of the Lynch homestead, he breathes out with effort and says grimly, “Well here we are.”

And that means something different, too.

Afterwards, sitting passenger in his silken black BMW, the middle Lynch brother forgoes toilet paper and stems his bloody nose with his silken black tie.

“Only another week,” Gansey is promising. “It won’t be so hard after that.”

Ronan’s nose is too blocked with blood to snort, but his silence is skeptical.

Everything Ronan once knew to be permanent has been dismantled. The Barns can be renovated and made trendy. Aurora Lynch’s wedding dress can be shredded and made unholy. Fathers can be killed and made human.

He feels, more and more, like his own impossible existence is the only thing in Henrietta that does not change. It’s always hard. It’s been hard for longer than Gansey could know.

Gansey tries again: “Should we go and get spectacularly drunk?”

“Yes,” says Ronan.

Afterwards, the seminarian coaxes his shitbox car back from the dead, follows the slow curve of road back towards the old stone church and the warped wooden floor of the upstairs attic. The radio plays quiet, empty static and Adam imagines that his dead left ear catches voices—prayers like radio waves, crossing the mountains.

He thinks, _If you’re there… _and then doesn’t know what else to say.

When the seminarian was young, he spent Sundays in his grandfather’s garage watching old baseball games taped on grainy VCR. It was a place of quiet contemplation. Adam learned faith as his grandfather muttered threats and promises at the television in equal turn, like perhaps through fervor alone he might change the course of a game taped three years earlier. That was praying.

Once, Adam’s grandmother doused him with a great splash of holy water because he was sitting too still for her liking—“watchin’ the dust in the air like a cat,” she said suspiciously. Adam watched the damp stain on his shirt shrink and dry, feeling he’d touched something powerful. He’d gotten his hand into a light socket for just a second before they’d pulled him away. That was praying, too.

It doesn’t come so easy now.

A small body cuts suddenly across the road, weaves between headlights.He has to brake, stop short, catch his breath. The fox turns back at the side of the road, considers him with yellow eyes.

Adam breathes out through his teeth.

…


	2. ii

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ronan pisses on a church, defaces a grave, asks impolite questions. Adam eats an apple.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> truly so blown away and honored by the response to the last chapter. here's a big long one for ya bc I couldn't find a good place to split it. pretend it's intentional and artistic like one of those directors who films their scenes in one single take
> 
> tw: some violence, mentions of child abuse, also like a brief allusion to eye horror - nothing more graphic than anything maggie threw at us tbh

Some time during the night of spectacular drunkenness, a rainstorm sweeps in. The next morning the church parking lot is full of black umbrellas, but Ronan walks bare-headed through the rain. He dips two fingers into the well of holy water and blesses himself on his rain-spattered forehead. 

It’s been about three years since Ronan’s gone to church. Once, Sunday mass was as regular as breathing, as shifting gears in the BMW, as lifting his foot off the brake just as the opposing stoplight turned red. 

He can’t quite explain why he stopped going—partly Noah and partly an acceptance of his own unholy existence. He cannot quite explain why he goes back—partly Noah and partly the scornful seminarian, rebutting him in Latin. 

“Your nose is  _ fucked _ , man,” Matthew says in greeting, a little too loud. He is fundamentally incapable of whispering, but also fundamentally incapable of offense. The old ladies in the next pew only beam at him benevolently. 

“Inside voice, shitbrain.” 

Declan nods his head in Ronan’s direction without turning his eyes. 

“Been a while,” he says coldly. “You’d better not receive, unless you’re planning to take Confession.”

Ronan swears at him half-heartedly and drops his forehead to his fists, gropes at prayer. 

When Ronan was young, his father brought him a great book about the saints—each page edged in gold, displaying colorful illustrations of martyrdom. St. Stephen, beautiful and birdlike, pierced by arrows. St. Lucy, bearing her eyes on a silver platter. Perpetua and Felicity, intertwined, pecked to death by crows. Joan of Arc, crop-haired and boyish among the flames. 

The book inspired hours of elaborate games of Saints, which mostly involved Ronan tying Matthew to trees and prodding him with a stick, saying, “Confess, confess.” Matthew’s role was simple: He was meant only to say “Never! Never!” and to prayerfully accept his fate, but he was not very good at playing martyr. He was too agreeable by far and generally proceeded to say, “Alright, I’ll confess” before the real agonies could even begin. And yet the Lynch brothers never considered trading places. Even then, they knew their roles.

They played wilder, frenzied games of Old Testament, too—tearing through the woods in breathless, jubilant terror. The rules of the game were loose, except to note that God was angry and would have His wrath. God took various forms—the swollen creek after a rainstorm or the crazily spinning wheel of an overturned wheelbarrow or the mean, half-blind goat in the back pasture—but the point wasn’t really God at all. The point was the running and the being afraid. 

Declan could be persuaded to play Old Testament, but never Saints. Eventually he could not be persuaded to play at all. 

When it comes time to grasp hands and mumble  _ peace be with you _ , he turns away from Ronan and busies himself clasping hands with the old ladies in the next row. A handsome politician, bidding,  _ and with your spirit _ . 

“Peace be with you, motherfucker,” Matthew says heartily, grips Ronan’s hand with both of his own. “ATVs tonight? It’s gonna be mud city.”

When the lines form for communion, Ronan ducks out of the church and into the rain. He thinks about going back to the Barns, but the driveway is crowded with contractors’ cars and the dining room is wallpapered with Ashley’s vision boards and seating charts. Six days until the wedding.

He thinks about going back to Monmouth and drinking a morning beer in the bathroom/kitchen while Gansey goes around cross-eyed, lamenting that he’s slept in his contacts once again. But the wonderful familiarity of that thought turns Ronan wretched and raw in a way that makes him long for his old leather wristbands, for something to gnaw. He misses Noah. He misses Gansey. He misses being seventeen and stupid enough to act on the relentless self-destruction that ticks under his jaw. 

He wanders around the back of the church to visit the stained glass window he always liked best, a portrait of the Virgin Mary assembled in big jeweled slabs of red and orange. She always reminded him of his mother—the serene white face, the snake crushed beneath her graceful foot. In the steady rain, she seems to weep. 

Ronan is standing there, warring between huge sadness and fury, when the seminarian wrestles a hamper of laundry out a back door.

“What’re you doing back here?” the seminarian asks, decidedly suspicious. 

“Pissing,” Ronan says, because the truth is too pathetic. 

The seminarian nods slowly. “Pissing on a church. Classy stuff.”

He has a strange, still kind of face that makes Ronan think of his illustrated book of saints, of towheaded Joan burning impassively. A soft-looking amber sweater swings an arm from the laundry hamper. Ronan takes it by the wrist, returns the stray sleeve to the hamper. 

When he looks up, Adam is studying him with careful, keen eyes. 

“Thanks.”

“You live here or something?” Ronan asks. “What, in the fucking belfry?”

“Sometimes,” says Adam. His eyes travel back to the door he’s just exited, to the window Ronan was standing before. “It’s a finished attic. Less Victor Hugo than you’re thinking.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Ronan says, retreating into shittiness. 

The seminarian frowns down at his laundry, at a white t-shirt being dappled gray, and then lifts his chin to the sky like he’s just realized it’s raining. 

“Sure,” he says, begins hefting the hamper towards the Worst car Ronan has ever seen. “Just like you don’t speak Latin or go to church, right?” 

“I don’t go to church.” Ronan watches him struggle with the car door, which seems to involve a manual lock with an actual key. His sensibilities are offended, probably, although mostly he’s noticing the seminarian’s hands, their precise movements and boyish knuckles. “I just had to piss.” 

At the front of the church, a bell begins to ring. Mass has ended and the doors will be flung open. Matthew will dip a fist into holy water, carelessly blessing the golden curl that hangs over his forehead. Declan will stop to shake the priest’s hand with both of his own, to make smarmy comments about a  _ beautiful  _ homily, to say how  _ sorry  _ they were he couldn’t make dinner last night. 

“So, what,” Adam says, slamming the trunk and turning to consider Ronan curiously. “You don’t believe in God?”

Ronan lifts a shoulder, drops it. The rain is pressing the seminarian’s dust-colored hair onto his dust-colored forehead, revealing the uneven line of a very poor haircut and the precise lines of a finely-molded skull. 

“I believe in God,” he says at last, because he doesn’t lie. “I just think he’s a fucking bastard.” 

Adam starts to laugh and then doesn’t. He puts his hand to just below his own eye, upsetting a raindrop. He nods again, thoughtful. 

“I guess there’s textual support for that. Unmarried mom and all that.”

This is, impossibly, a joke. Neither laughs, but they both understand it is a joke. It is a nice moment, and under the almost-priest’s gaze Ronan feels his bones go thin and crushable, like a soda can under tires. He wishes for his leather bracelets, for something to grip.

“Well also,” he says, reaching and finding only cruelty, “hurricanes and dead parents and abortion clinic shooters and whatever sad fucking circumstances led you to live in the attic of a church.”

The chapel bell stops ringing. The seminarian lifts his chin and drops it, gives Ronan a look of mild and absolute contempt. 

“Victor Hugo,” he says, “wrote  _ The Hunchback of Notre Dame _ . It was assigned reading for all Aglionby freshman.” 

And then he leaves for the laundromat with a shocking amount of dignity for a rain-soaked boy in a skeleton car. Ronan, alone, bites down hard on the skin of his inner wrist. 

…

The day’s rain turns the back pasture, as Matthew promised, to mud city. The Lynch brothers unearth the ATVs from one of the few barns untouched by Ashley’s tea lights and flower arrangements, and spend two glorious hours ripping through the flooded fields. 

Gansey joins, bringing some awful artisanal beer that only Matthew really enjoys, and they dig deep, muddy craters in the ground. Months later, when the ground is frozen solid and the Barns is his solitary kingdom once more, Ronan will weave through these tire tracks on his way to feed the cows and think of his brothers and the yellow death of August and Gansey’s grin, black with mud. 

Ashley makes a few sedate circles on the back of Declan’s vehicle and then begs off: “This is a little too, like, Middle America Masculinity for me.” When the boys troop in hours later, filthy and frozen, they find she’s set out mugs of cider—bone cold by now, but an oddly generous gesture. 

It’s a good night. In six days, Declan and Ashley will disappear to some bullshit “Service Honeymoon” publicity stunt, and Matthew will go back to skipping classes and being kind to girls at college parties, and Ronan will be alone with the Barns once more. 

Ashley is arguing with her wedding planner over Skype and Declan is trying to engage Gansey in an argument about universal income and Matthew is wondering aloud if it’s appropriate to quote  _ The Godfather  _ in his best man speech. Ronan suffers through one of Gansey’s horrible beers and thinks that maybe he will survive the wedding after all.

“Hey,” he says some time later, “the priest from last night. The fuckin- seminarian. Did you know him? From school?”

“No,” says Gansey, who is getting pleasantly drunk off his second horrible beer, “should I have?”

“I think he went to Aglionby,” Ronan says.

“Christ,” Gansey says, “maybe I  _ am  _ out of touch. Do you know what that waitress asked me? She asked if I knew how much a banana costs.”

“Did she?” Declan is amused. “I must’ve missed that part of her tirade.”

“Oh, it was earlier today,” Gansey says distractedly. “I went back to retract my previous apology. How much is a banana, do you think?”

“One cent,” Matthew says. “Price is Right rules.” 

“Thirty recorded seconds of this conversation,” Ashley calls from the next room, “and none of you would ever work in politics again. This is, like,  _ so  _ out-of-touch-elite of you.”

“How much does a banana cost, Ashley?” Declan fires back. 

A telling silence. Then, peevishly, “I’m on the  _ phone _ .”

Matthew starts showing Declan videos on his phone from rugby practice—a sport suited to Matthew’s solidity and cheerful taste for mud. Gansey opens another beer and drops into a kitchen chair, presses the cold glass bottle against Ronan’s knuckles in greeting. 

“We were pigs in high school,” he says, which means that all this time he’s been half-thinking of the seminarian, the Aglionby student they cannot remember. Ronan loves him for this unshakeable inner decency. “We lacked perspective.”

A kind way of putting it. They lived in a half-finished warehouse and subsisted off snack food and the occasional fancy dinner when the Ganseys came to town for Aglionby alumni events. Their kitchen was also the bathroom where Gansey shaved Ronan’s head, where Ronan patched Noah’s skinned knees after they built a skateboard ramp to the moon. They followed Gansey into the Virginia wilderness when his ennui demanded it of him. They tracked Ronan down when he disappeared, usually before it was too late. Sometimes they did homework. 

They were friends like planets in orbit are friends. They didn’t have friends outside of that. 

“We should see Noah,” Gansey says quietly. Ronan tugs the beer from Gansey’s willing fist and takes a long gulp. 

…

The next morning, on the way to visit Noah, they stop in a shitty gas station convenience store for supplies—a sixpack of Diet Coke, a sleeve of powdered donuts, a little plastic toy car from the vending machine, and a toxic-colored energy drink for Gansey. He is wearing his hangover handsomely in the polite, pained line between his brows. After some consideration, he adds a travel-sized bottle of contact solution to the stack, and then a hilariously outdated book of highways maps. 

Ronan loves him. He loves Gansey the way he loved things as a child—fierce, gnawing, wanting to get him between his teeth and worry him and press dents into him. He settles for letting Gansey pay, letting Gansey drive the BMW away from Henrietta, towards the graveyard. 

“Cemetery,” Gansey says, makes a face. “Don’t make it sound grim.”

“It is grim,” Ronan says. Also, “I like grim things.”

It is a little bit grim; they sit in the grass by Noah and Gansey drives the little plastic toy car up the side of his headstone, over the scrolling cherubs and seraphs, between the divots that mark his year of birth and year of death and the little hyphen that separates them. Ronan cracks the cans of Coke one by one, pours them relentlessly into the grass. 

“The landscapers,” Gansey says, “must be out for your blood.”

“I told Noah I would,” Ronan says. It was only a joke at the time, but so was the thought that Noah might actually die. Gansey knows that. But surely Gansey also knows that Ronan is secretly, in his bones, a faithful creature. 

They share the donuts. They play the  _ remember when Noah  _ game. They play the  _ Ronan, have you given any further thought to  _ game, where Gansey tries to convince Ronan to sell the Barns or to enroll in some online college classes or to at least come spend a weekend in DC once a month. Ronan goes stoutly silent and waits for Gansey to give up, flipping through the book of outdated maps of Henrietta, fingernail tracing highway lines that have been rerouted, following roads that no longer exist. 

Gansey relents eventually. He and Ronan share the last can of warm, sizzling Diet Coke. They watch people come and go, performing the strange rituals of mourning. 

“Do you think we ought to say something?” Gansey asks, casting concerned eyes at an older man, who is doubled over in noisy grief. “Poor man.”

“Bullshit,” Ronan says. 

“Ronan,” says Gansey, with the sort of surprised disappointment Ronan just can’t seem to outgrow, “You can’t call someone who’s grieving  _ bullshit _ .”

“That’s bullshit grieving. Nobody fucking grieves like that, except in fucking- Evanescence music videos,” Ronan persists. He skips the Hot Wheels car off the lip of the headstone, takes the curving C of  _ Czerny  _ on two wheels. “Trust me, he’s at a different grave every week. He can’t get enough of it.”

Gansey doesn’t answer for so long that Ronan stops playing with the car and looks up, alarmed. 

Gansey is looking at him in this awful, kind way that makes Ronan feel bare and adolescent and freshly orphaned. Like the first time he asked Gansey to help shave his head. Like the first day back at Monmouth after Noah found him, bloodied, in a church. 

“What?” 

“You come here every week?”

“Fuck off,” Ronan says, lurching to his feet. “Fuck off, Gansey.”

“I didn’t-“ Now Gansey is sorrowful, brushing the red Henrietta dirt off his knees, doing something with his hands that makes Ronan feel like a cornered animal, skittish and dangerous. Around him, the gravestones sprout like crooked teeth in an ungainly mouth. 

He says, “I want to go.”

Gansey says, “Okay.”

In the car he tries again: “When I say I’m worried about you, I don’t mean that the life you have here is pitiful or worrisome. I only mean that-“

“I’ll drive off the road,” says Ronan. “I’ll fucking wreck this car, Gansey, I swear to fucking Christ.”

He is not a liar; Gansey knows. After that, the car is quiet until Ronan pulls down the drive to the Barns. The BMW’s wheels spit up gravel, the sound as familiar as the tap of rain on Ronan’s bedroom window, as the absent-minded drum of his mother’s nails against the kitchen counter as she waited for toast to brown, for tea to steep. 

“I’m sorry,” Gansey says. “It hurts me to go visit him. It makes me feel- It was wrong of me.”

Ronan says, “I have to go feed the sheep” because he does and because he cannot turn and look Gansey in his earnest, handsome face right now. 

Gansey says, “Okay.”

Ronan plunges out into the sodden fields, ground sinking under his heels and then flooding over his toes in cold, muddy welcome. He works vigorously until his blood is pumping hot from work, not from fury. Then he stands and lets the calves nose at his palms until he remembers that he is capable of soft touch, of building things, of gentleness. 

It took the Barns to remind him of this, to show him that he could be sheathed. He could touch without drawing blood. He doesn’t know how to voice this to Gansey. This life he’s built, lonesome and laborious, is the kindest thing he’s ever done.

He starts back to the house—thinking of a shower and a sandwich and then maybe an afternoon spent repairing the back fence, working hard and mindless as he can—but his peaceful thoughts are interrupted. 

He meets his brother in the muddy fields, gesturing grandly and instructing a cluster of interlopers to step over the muddy ATV tracks that slice through the fields like fresh wounds. Declan is wearing a pair of their father’s old muck boots and talking chummily to the old, shitty pastor of St. Agnes. Ashley sloshes gamely through the mud beside them. Trailing several yards behind, Gansey is talking to the seminarian with the brilliant, lit-up intensity he only gets around, like, old cars and old books. 

“Oh, Ronan!” says Declan. It is not a greeting so much as an expletive. His eyes cut sideways to the pastor like he wants to apologize for the nastiness. “Father Sandi came by to discuss readings for the wedding. We thought he’d like to see the renovations. You don’t have to come. I’m sure you’re busy-“

“I’m not,” says Ronan, because it will make Declan unhappy. It does. 

They strike out into the golden August afternoon, each step marking great muddy thumbprints into the earth. Ronan lets Gansey and the seminarian overtake him, lets Gansey jostle their elbows in the fraternal, jocular way that means they are not fighting anymore. 

“Ronan tells me,” Gansey says, kingly and grandfatherly in equal turn, “that you are a fellow Aglionby alum.”

The seminarian’s face does something complicated. He shakes his head. 

“No,” he says, “I’m not. I only attended for a few months. It didn’t work out.”

“Ah,” says Gansey, regretful. 

Up ahead, Ashley is telling Pastor Sandi, “I’ve always been really suspicious of organized religion, but I think there’s something really chic about having a  _ real  _ priest at a wedding.” 

Ronan looks sideways at the seminarian. “Are you a real priest?”

The seminarian looks sideways at Ronan. “I will be.”

Gansey starts telling Adam very earnestly about his own personal agnosticism, but his deep and sincere intellectual interest in ancient Catholicism. And has he done much reading on the Druid priest-magicians? He hasn’t, of course, because nobody’s done as much reading as Gansey has. He’s got several books he’d be happy to lend Adam, if only he asks.

“I really admire the idea of a vocation,” Gansey says. For a minute, he shifts into the Gansey that Ronan knows best—longing, wistful. “A calling. I envy you that. I imagine it gives you purpose.”

“Lots of things can be a vocation,” Adam says, noncommittal. “Marriage could be a vocation. Academia. You know,” he adds, “I always assumed you’d go into politics.”

“Oh, no,” Gansey says cheerfully, “I have far too much existential dread for politics.”

The almost-priest laughs boyishly. Ronan puts the cuff of his shirt into his mouth and wanders ahead, following Declan and the old pastor into the barn. 

It’s one of the newer structures, selected by Declan and Ashley primarily for its lack of musty, sour Live Animal Smell. Ronan’s father mostly used it for storing curios, a disassembled carousel, mysterious crates. Once, he’d climbed up into the rafters and secured a rope swing there. The Lynch boys had swung for a blissful week, burning their hands scarlet against the scratchy rope, until Ronan fell and broke his arm and Declan carried him back to the house through the muddy fields, begging him not to cry. 

“It looks remarkable,” Gansey tells Ashley. “Helen will be so pleased. I should FaceTime her.”

It’s a big, open room with lots of light. Everything smells sweetly of sawdust. Ashley is pointing into the rafters, indicating where they will string lights, where they will hang flowers. 

Ronan chews on his sleeve and thinks of the sharp bite of rope against palm, the brilliant blue sky crashing down to meet his pointed toes as he sailed towards the open barn doors. Declan saying, “Stop, Ronan. Don’t cry. Dad will be mad. Don’t cry.” 

One of the barncats threads between the seminarian’s ankles. When he bends to offer the cat an elegant hand, Ronan’s eyes catch in the swirl at the back of his skull where his hair grows. 

“You really grew up here?” the seminarian asks. He doesn’t look up, but he is addressing Ronan like he knows he’s being watched. 

The part of Ronan that is perpetually seventeen and orphaned wants to snarl,  _ what in this barn?  _ but he swallows it back. Living in a place that he loves so profoundly has softened him, maybe. 

“Mostly,” he says. “Sometimes. Not during Aglionby.”

Adam sits back on his heels, strokes the cat beneath her chin with one boyish knuckle. Ronan’s hands itch with rope burn. His stomach swoops like he is swinging for the sky. 

He says, “How come you left?”

“That’s,” Adam looks up at him, “not a very polite thing to ask, you know.”

“I’m not polite,” Ronan says. The barn has been re-floored in shiny, honey hardwood panels and his boots have already muddied them unforgivably—an unholy map of his progress. “Gansey says it’s because I had a troubled childhood.”

Adam laughs in a way that Ronan can’t touch. He puts up a hand, tugs at the lobe of his left ear, tilts his face to the sun streaming in from the big, raised windows. 

“Maybe I failed out,” he says, eyes closed. 

“You didn’t fail out,” Ronan says with certainty. 

Adam’s shoulder lifts, drops. The cat arches her back under the ministrations of his beautiful hands. Ronan thinks of swinging, stretching his feet like he might kick a dent in the sky. 

“Maybe,” Adam says, “I had a troubled childhood, too.”

“ _ Sort of brown-ish _ ,” Helen Gansey’s voice laments. “Brown-ish. Don’t you study art history? One detail, Dick. Is it walnut? Maple?”

Gansey wanders between them, holding his phone aloft. His sister is peering out from the screen inquisitively, firing questions and becoming increasingly dissatisfied with Gansey’s answers. 

“Just take a guess,” she wheedles. “Just an estimate. How high do you think the ceilings are?” 

“I don’t have an eye for those things,” Gansey protests. “I can’t just  _ tell _ .”

“Who else is there?” Helen demands. “Hand me to someone less useless. Is Ronan there? Ask Ronan how high the ceilings are.” 

Ronan buries his fists in his pockets so that Gansey cannot hand him the phone, no matter how vigorously his eyebrows plead. They may not be fighting anymore, but that doesn’t mean Ronan can’t take some satisfaction from watching Gansey be out-Ganseyed by his beautiful, hypercompetent sister.

“Ronan,” Gansey reports, “is being impossible.”

Ronan grins. 

Gansey goes find the bride-to-be. The cat, grown tired of petting, lingers by the barn door, tail erect. Ronan shoulders the door open and follows the cat out into the afternoon light, watching her pad towards the creek and the prayer trees.

“Do they ever get locked in?” Adam asks. He’s standing framed in the doorway like a perfect portrait of rural Virginia, like some sepia-toned photo of the Dust Bowl come to life. He is watching the cat. “I’d worry.”

Ronan shakes his head. 

“We had a cat,” he says, and is startled by it, “with one eye. When I was a kid. My dad called her Nobody, like the fuckin- Cyclops story in the Odyssey.”

Adam’s mouth does something pleasing, pleased—nearly a smile. Ronan almost chokes because he wants to tell this slow-mouthed seminarian how he loved that mean old one-eyed cat. How he loved his father’s stories of the Odyssey, bastardized and misremembered and peppered with swears. 

“She went missing for a whole winter,” he says, “and we thought she must’ve kicked it. Met a coyote, wandered onto the road. Just plain froze.”

Each night Ronan would set out food for her, each morning he found the food untouched. His mother eventually sat the Lynch boys down and they discussed mortality and the reality that all things, even cats, must die. 

“Then come spring, my dad unlocks one of the old storage sheds, and there’s the fattest fucking one-eyed cat he’s ever seen. Plus half a dozen kittens. She got locked in with the sacks of cattle feed, lived like a king.”

Adam smiles then. Ronan locks his knees so they will not buckle. Thinks,  _ fuck.  _ Thinks,  _ please _ . 

He says, “Want to see something? You’ll like it.”

Adam considers him curiously, in a way that makes Ronan feel shamed for saying so boldly  _ you’ll like it _ . It feels a little too close to saying  _ I know you _ . 

But Adam says only, “Okay.” And he steps out of the doorframe, into the sunlight. 

…

This is a story, unavoidably, about God. It could be argued that all stories are, in their bones, about God—in the same way that all stories are, in their bones, about language and letter and sound.

The seminarian was not raised in religion like the Lynch brothers. If there was a God, He didn’t linger in the dusty trailer lot where Adam grew up, among barking dogs and garage doors hanging open like vacant mouths. If God ever came near, it was by mistake—a wrong turn on His way to somewhere holier—and He rolled up His windows, double-checked the locks, shifted into reverse. 

As a boy Adam prayed to God occasionally, asking only small favors.  _ Please God, don’t let the floorboards creak. Please God, let the fridge door open noiselessly. Please God, let me one day breathe air that don’t grit my teeth with dust. _ When these requests went unanswered, Adam stopped asking. He was a proud boy, a trailer park boy, raised in a place where you didn’t push your luck. 

He walks now through the muddied fields of the Barns, following the middle Lynch brother across a plank bridge. It is hard for him to imagine growing up in a place like this—lush, well-worn, beautiful. The middle Lynch brother is no less strange or beautiful, but he makes more sense here. 

_ You’ll like it _ , he said. Adam can’t decide if this pleases him. 

Ronan’s voice registers as a low hum, barely distinguishable from the rattling crescendo of cicadas. Adam turns his face towards him, raises his voice. 

“I’m deaf in my left ear. Say it again?”

In the overheated attic room above St. Agnes, seventeen and battered, Adam first read the story of St. Paul’s conversion and laughed aloud. Saul, nonbeliever, was thrown from his donkey and struck blind at the sight of God. 

Adam, nonbeliever, was thrown down his trailer steps by his father and struck half-deaf. In the church attic, he put his face to the waterstained ceiling and thought,  _ okay You win. You have me. Do what You fucking will. _

Ronan says, “I said we’re here.”

They have come to a sudden clearing, smelling sweetly of rot. Adam finds he is encircled by stunted, gnarled apple trees—wizened, screwed-up faces regarding him with suspicion. 

He says, “Oh.”

He moves closer to the nearest tree and finds its trunk has been slashed and crudely carved. A doubled-over form. Triangular letters beneath his searching fingers declaring,  _ Adoramus te, Christe.  _ For a second he is disappointed. This is a story, unavoidably, about God. 

He turns back to Ronan. “It’s a prayer.”

Ronan moves between the trees with curatorial ease, at home among the uncanny. He kicks at fallen apples, touches the trees with familiarity. Adam’s fingers find splintering letters, trace the shape of  _ tuam redemisti mundum.  _

“Praying trees,” Ronan says. He snaps off a dead branch without mercy, gestures with it like a great skeletal hand. “‘Cause of the way they’re bent. That’s what we called them.”

Adam gets, again, the knuckling tightness in his chest at the strangeness of this place. Everything lush, everything loved. Even the trees seem to watch him, humming  _ stranger _ .

“Who carved them?”

“My father,” Ronan says. He’s looking up into the treetops now, profile as angular and strange as the trees and the Latin words carved there— _ thou hast redeemed the world _ . “He liked that kind of shit.”

“What,” Adam says. “Praying?”

“Curios,” Ronan says absently. “Pagan shit. Reasons not to go to church— _ There _ you are, you little fucking baby-“

A stirring of air by Adam’s left ear, close enough to make him flinch backwards, and then the explosion assembles itself into a sleek, black shape on Ronan’s shoulder. It opens its mouth and makes a rusty noise between a dry creekbed and a chainlink-fence. Adam stares. 

“A bird,” he says. 

“Chainsaw,” Ronan corrects him nonsensically. He is visibly enjoying Adam’s surprise. He is also stroking the bird very gently with the knuckle of his middle finger. “What, you thought I brought you out here to look at some fuckin’ Jesus trees?” 

“As opposed to,” Adam says flatly, although secretly he is pleased, “what? Your familiar?” 

Ronan turns his face to the bird, dark-headed conspirators in this odd crooked clearing. Adam rounds the circle of trees, examining the carved Stations of the Cross, stepping on fallen apples which burst sickly beneath his shoes. He replays again and again the ripe crack of his skull against stair. 

He says, “It’s not afraid of you.”

“No,” Ronan agrees. Then, “She, not It.”

“You tamed her?”

Ronan makes a face that indicates his distaste for the word  _ tamed _ . He himself, Adam understands, is not a tame thing. The whole stretch of the Barns, asymmetrical and shabby, is not tame. 

“Fine, then,” Adam says. “Not tame.”

“I raised her when she was a baby,” Ronan says. “She’s a colleague, not a pet.”

The laugh takes Adam by surprise. He has to put up splayed fingers to cover his mouth, turn his face back to the tree trunk. His fingers press into grooves of bark, find a crumpled form. Jesus falls for the first or second or third time. His feet remember  _ splat.  _ His skull remembers  _ splat.  _

“You were right,” he says without turning from the tree. “I do like it here.” 

Ronan doesn’t answer for so long that Adam thinks his reply must have been lost to his deaf ear. He turns back, finds Ronan watching him with some unnamed expectation. 

“I didn’t hear. Did you say something?” 

“No,” Ronan says, still looking. Eventually, “Want to pet her?”

Neither Adam nor Chainsaw is particularly enthused by this suggestion. She submits haughtily to Adam’s tentative knuckle, hooked little feet pressing divots into the shoulder of Ronan’s shirt. She smells like bird—which is to say, forest. Musty, damp, and sour.

“Who prepares for the raven its nourishment,” Adam recites, touching the raven’s back lightly, “When its young cry to God and wander about without food?”

“Me,” Ronan says, but he doesn’t ask Adam where the verse is from. He probably knows. The Lynch brothers grew up in this place of consecration, where even the trees know Latin. “I fucking do.”

Chainsaw’s wings lift, fold, as if to smooth over the feathers that Adam’s clumsy hands have mussed. He draws back, fingertips vaguely oily. Around him, the cicadas chatter and the trees pray. 

Ronan says, “There’s a psalm, too. Ravens eating your eyes. Something fucked up like that.”

“The eye that mocks a father and scorns a mother,” Adam recalls, lifting his chin as if to access the memory. “The ravens of the valley will pick it out and the young eagles will eat it.”

“Well, fuck me,” Ronan says. He lifts a hand to his eye, knuckles covering socket like an eyepatch. Blinded. 

Adam’s mouth reaches for a smile. He thinks of the burst of color behind his eyes when his head struck the steps. He puts up his own hand, fits the heel of hand into the hollow of eye. Blinded.

…

“So, what,” Ronan says as they leave the praying trees. “Do you have the whole fuckin’ Bible memorized?”

Chainsaw wheels overhead like a bad omen. Ronan’s heart does the painful, oversized thing it always does when he thinks of his bird, of this place that he loves. Ronan dreams sometimes of roots. When he wakes, he is bewildered by his own hands—unmoored, unfastened. 

“No,” Adam says. He’s absently polishing an apple against his shirt, eyes on Chainsaw. “Old Testament, mostly. Some of Revelations. Do you?”

“No,” Ronan says, “just the good parts. Wrestling with God. Birds eating eyes. When God was still on his wrath shit.”

Adam’s mouth moves, half a smile. “A vengeful God. Yeah. I get the appeal.”

“You shouldn’t eat that,” Ronan says. 

“Right,” Adam says wearily, “the burden of knowledge of good and evil. Adam and the apple. Funny stuff, man.”

“No,” Ronan says, “they’re wild. Sour as fuck.”

Adam’s hand touches his left ear. He laughs like he is surprised. As they tramp through the dying afternoon, he drops the apple somewhere in the middle of the field, lets it roll from his fingers to the yellowing grass. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Adam is quoting Job 38:41 "who prepares the raven..." Ronan references Proverbs 30:17 "the eye that mocks a father..." 
> 
> The latin carved into the prayer trees is the Adoramus te, a stanza recited between the stations of the cross 
> 
> truly, thank u so much for reading and for all the nice encouragement. lmk if ur having fun! im having fun! and come talk to me on [tumblr](https://charactershoesfic.tumblr.com)if u want!! there's also a fic post if u wanna rec to a friend or just see some sick pics of stigmata hands lmao


	3. iii

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> churchyard ruins, backyard bonfires, two stories about a fox. also, helen gansey

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeehaw here is chapter 3!!! it includes my favorite scene I've ever written, probably - hope it brings u some satisfaction, too
> 
> tw for a joking allusion to the catholic sex abuse scandal and some brief nongraphic mentions of animal harm, child abuse

The wedding is on Friday and today is Tuesday, which means that Declan’s ears are starting to emit smoke. Ashley disappears into a white Suburban full of white sorority sisters, on their way to Richmond to have their teeth bleached and their faces rubbed with, like, placenta or something. Ronan climbs onto the roof of the farmhouse and watches the driveway fill with vans—florists, caterers, Irish string musicians, somebody whose only job seems to be folding napkins.

“Helen will be here tonight,” Gansey says gloomily, crawling out the window to join Ronan on the roof.

Ronan kicks his shin in gentle commiseration. The Gansey siblings have a complicated relationship, although _complicated _herein entails a stubborn WASP-y inability to talk about feelings and a shared skilled in making others feel small—significantly less murdered fathers and parking lot fistfights than Ronan is accustomed to.

“We could get drunk.”

“No,” Gansey sighs.

“No,” Ronan agrees.

“How tragic to be grown up,” Gansey says, mournful and handsome. He squints up at the low-hanging sun. “I have so much reading to do.”

“I have to fix a fucking fence,” says Ronan.

Gansey laughs at this for so long that Ronan has to laugh, too—at how differently their lives, rooted in this place, have grown. He is glad Gansey is here.

They spend the morning in the late August sun. Ronan clips wire and swears at splinters and fixes a fence while Gansey sprawls in the grass and reads aloud in his fine, kingly voice about ancient Welsh burial rituals.

“You seem happier,” he says abruptly, breaking off reading.

Ronan’s neck hurts from bending over the fence. “Don’t make this a thing, Gansey.”

“Not a thing,” Gansey confirms. He holds his book over his face to block out the sun. “I just feel better when I see you like this. It makes me feel okay about leaving.”

“I never,” Ronan says, even and angry, “asked you to fucking stay-“

“I know,” Gansey says. He sits up, earnest and sunlit. “I know that, Ronan. That doesn’t mean I don’t feel rotten for going.”

This conflict sits between them again—their fundamental difference, less funny than it was earlier on the roof. Gansey has books to read and Ronan has fences to fix. Gansey won’t stay and Ronan won’t go. Maybe _won’t_ is the wrong word—maybe the word is _can’t_. Either way, it is an impasse.

Ronan relents. “Read your book, dick.”

Gansey takes the prickly peace offering. He falls back into the grass, lifts the book, and then puts it down.

“I asked the seminarian to show me around the old church ruins tonight,” he says. “You know the one? There are some religious icons that I always thought looked a bit Druidic.”

“Noah and I used to smoke weed there,” Ronan says.

“In a churchyard?” Gansey is offended. Then, “Without me?”

“Are you inviting me?” Ronan asks. “Or just letting me know in case you end up dead in some graveyard?”

“Inviting you,” Gansey says. Then, thoughtfully, “Technically speaking everyone ends up dead in some graveyard eventually.”

“Cheers to that,” Ronan says. Gansey holds his book up to block the sun and resumes his reading.

…

The farther they drive into the wooded hills, the farther they seem to press into autumn. The season has not yet encroached on Henrietta, but the leaves’ red undersides are promising.

The Pig, still much beloved, cannot be counted on to make the four-hour drive down from DC anymore, so Ronan drives them in BMW, lest they bear the indignity of riding in Gansey’s awful rental car.

The seminarian sits quietly in the backseat. There is something about his face, cool and vacant, that promises autumn as well. Ronan tries not to watch. He mutely obeys when Adam directs him to turn here, to park on the shoulder here.

“Have you lived here all your life?” Gansey asks.

“All my life,” Adam echoes.

The church is not really a church at all, but a huddled ruin in the shadows of the purple mountains—no roof, only a skeleton of walls. The windows stand open, toothless mouths. A path of hard-packed dirt leads to a doorless entry.

The churchyard is surrounded by a low stone wall. It is easy enough to step over the wall, but Gansey goes instead to the rusted lych-gate and coaxes it open. Ronan loves him for this—this Gansey-like magic, respectful and right—for the way Adam watches him, says nothing, follows through the gate.

“Just how I remember it,” Gansey says.

He and Adam move through the stooped gravestones, seeking out the Druidic iconography that Gansey remembers. Ronan goes and stands in the roofless church, puts back his face to study the sky, tree branches intruding like cracks in a great sheet of gray-blue glass.

He and Noah didn’t really smoke weed here often—twice, maybe three times total. Ronan preferred other methods of self-obliteration and Noah preferred to get high in less spooky venues, which might also boast video games and snack foods and badly-dubbed anime.

“-lapsed Protestant myself, but you certainly can’t argue with Catholicism’s aesthetics,” Gansey’s voice says.

“It’s ripe for a haunting,” Adam’s voice agrees.

Ronan stretches out on a flat rock surface that might once have been an altar, closes his eyes. Once, he and Noah got high up here and pelted the church’s crumbling back wall with mushy, overripe crabapples. With his eyes closed, he can still summon the smell--sweet rot from the apples, skunky weed from Noah’s dealer who always overcharged.

There was a time when Ronan could only say Noah’s name through a sneer—it was a grief too whole and enormous to look at straight-on. It doesn’t hurt so much anymore. It’s more of an old bruise for Ronan to press his knuckles into, dull and comforting.

“I don’t know if you’d remember, but all I could talk about in high school was this ancient Welsh king-“

Gansey is talking about ancient funereal rites. Adam is very quiet except to ask an occasional question. Ronan knows the questions must be good because Gansey keeps saying “_HUH”_ in this happy, bewildered way.

“I wish I’d brought my old journals,” he says. “You’d laugh. It’s very probable I should have been in therapy. But I have so much old research. Some of it’s very interesting stuff.”

“Did you really think,” Adam says, “you’d find him?”

He’s not asking with incredulity or condescension or anything like that. It’s simply another thoughtful question posed in his clear, cool voice. Gansey emits another “_Huh_” like he is startled.

“Do you know,” he says. “I really think I did. I- As I’ve said, I should have been in therapy. But it gave me a purpose. I imagine it’s a bit like faith.”

Adam hums and doesn’t answer.

“Did you always know you’d be a priest?”

Adam says, “I thought I’d be a mechanic.”

Gansey laughs and then stops when the seminarian doesn’t join in. Adam offers no further explanation.

Back to questions of Welsh kings and ancient Catholicism, then, and discussions of gravestone-rubbings and evidence of early Welsh settlements in Virginia and the faulty boundaries between ancient accounts of magic and of miracle.

“Why’d you stop looking?”

“Huh. You know, I suppose I got tired of- of not finding anything. Man can’t live on faith alone, isn’t that the saying?”

“Bread,” says Adam. “Bread alone.”

After a while, Ronan opens his eyes to the scuff of leaves against stone. Gansey sits down on the altar beside him, lifts his face in the same prayerful and automatic way that Ronan had. Something about the gaping roof, the continuous sky demands reverence.

“Find your shit?” Ronan kicks at Gansey’s ankle.

“Maybe,” Gansey says, but he’s all alight with crisp air and purpose. For all his talk of vocation, he isn’t made for a stuffy Georgetown library, Ronan thinks. He should be trudging through fields, ruining his shoes, marking hand-drawn maps of uncharted forests. “The symbols and a couple traditional names. It suggests, at least, that some early immigrant population was still practicing more traditional funeral rites. It makes you wonder, why Henrietta?”

Ronan thinks this probably has something to do with Gansey’s oft-referenced graduate thesis, but he knows better than to ask about the thesis. Gansey will just get offended and say he’s already _told _Ronan about the topic a million times and can’t he at least _pretend _to take an interest in his life and doesn’t he, Gansey, always take the time to check in on Ronan’s life?

And then Ronan will do something pointed and unkind like ask Gansey to name _one thing _that Ronan does at the Barns and Gansey will get offended and quiet and say unhappily _crops? _And then Ronan will laugh unkindly and they will have to confront, again, the crooked ways they are growing away from each other.

So Ronan doesn’t ask. He lifts his chin to the seminarian, who stands framed in the doorless threshold of the church. “Want to come back to the Barns with us and burn some shit? You’ll like it.”

Adam’s mouth moves—not a smile, but an acknowledgement of these words. _You’ll like it_.

…

It’s a cool night. Autumn continues its slow occupation. Ashley’s bridesmaids unearth folding chairs and a box of old blankets. Ronan and Matthew make trips to the dumpster behind the renovated barn, carrying back armfuls of torn-up plywood and wooden crate and cardboard. By the time their arms are tired, it is a pyre worthy of a witch-burning.

Ronan feels sweaty and cold and kind, so he presses the box of matches into his brother’s chest and lets him do the honors.

Gansey’s sister Helen arrives. She and Matthew mix drinks on a big, flat chunk of plywood balanced between two lawn chairs. It is a haphazard affair—so are the drinks. The only thing Gansey’s beautiful executive sister and Ronan’s benevolent fratboy brother seem to have in common is their dangerous misconception of how large a shot is meant to be.

“I have a bartending license,” Helen says serenely. “I spent three weeks studying in Vancouver, you know.”

“Is Vancouver,” Gansey ventures, “especially known for its bartending?”

This earns him a withering look. Gansey puts his face into his drink. Ronan laughs until Helen thrusts another drink at him. 

“You should really rent this place out, you know,” she tells him. Then quickly, as his face darkens, “Not to live in, you territorial freak. For events. Weddings. Now that you’ve got a renovated venue-“

“Yeah, thanks for that,” Ronan says. “The heifers are gonna love that heated floor.”

Helen makes a face of despair and whisks away, making noise about tracking down some fresh mint and making mojitos for the bridesmaids.

Ronan hands the drink off to Adam. “I’m not drinking. When I drink, I fight my brother.”

Adam takes it. He’s watching Ronan with curiosity. “You’d really never sell it?”

“No,” Ronan says at once. When Adam keeps looking at him like he’s still waiting for an answer, Ronan lifts an arm to indicate a dogwood tree that stoops beside the back porch. “That tree got struck by lightning once. We saw it happen. It smoked and didn’t grow for three years, and then it started blooming again like nothing. My mom used to say the flowers smelled of ozone.”

Adam’s head turns to follow Ronan’s gestures. The trees over the driveway that sag with heavy, black plums. The huddled stones carved with crude crosses, marking the graves of three beloved barn cats. The sap-sticky pine tree where each spring the Lynch brothers had straightened their shoulders and held still as their father notched their heights into bark. A living record, still growing. One day even the lowest notch will sit above their heads.

“Okay,” Adam says quietly. “I get it.”

“The only time I didn’t live here,” Ronan says, like he’s only just realizing it, “it almost killed me.”

“Aglionby,” Adam says. His careful eyes on Ronan’s face. His face half-shadow, half-afire.

“Aglionby.” Ronan drops his arm, flings a bit of splintered wood towards the fire, feeling half-alight himself. “Look at us, couple of high school dropouts.”

“I left Aglionby, I didn’t _drop out_,” Adam’s face grows cool. Ronan realizes he’s made a mistake. “I guess public school must seem like a wasteland to you all, but they did hand out diplomas, you know-“

“Oh, Jesus,” Ronan says, “don’t fight with me about school shit. I don’t fucking care about a diploma.”

“Must be nice,” Adam says. He’s got that look of disgust from the parking lot now, that look of scathing and absolute conviction—saintlike. “Not everyone has a hundred-acre family farm to fall back on, you know.”

Ronan can’t think of anything to do except laugh, drop his head back helplessly. “Must be nice to be so _right _all the time.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I didn’t say anything about your public fucking school.”

Adam hides his face behind his drink. Ronan rips up some grass and throws it into the fire.

He says, “Also it’s something closer to thirty acres.”

“God, Ronan,” Adam says in disgust, and Ronan grins because he’s gotten a reaction and because it’s the first time Adam’s said Ronan’s name aloud. He flings another handful of dry grass into the fire.

Helen flirts with the bridesmaids. Gansey has to intervene to stop Matthew from distributing flaming shots. The night shifts, accommodates.

“You’re being,” Declan says some time later, voice loud with suspicion, “_so _quiet.”

Ronan looks at him with surprise. His brother is not drunk, but flushed with alcohol and heat from the fire. He’s dressed casually, but the jeans and flannel seem inauthentic—like a politician posing with the locals or an actor for a granola ad.

“What do you want me to say?”

Declan’s mouth opens and then closes.

“_Heyyyy_,” Ashley’s voice cuts in, unnaturally bright. “Everybody having fun?”

Then Gansey is stepping between them easily, pressing a beer into Declan’s hand like a flower down the barrel of a gun—a beautiful act of disarmament. “Everyone good?”

“Everyone,” Declan says, allowing Ashley to thread her arm through his, “is great.”

Ronan shakes his head darkly at Gansey’s look of inquiry, slumps back into his lawn chair.

“I don’t fucking know, man.”

“So what happens after priest school?” Helen is asking Adam. “You go wander a desert for forty days or something?”

“Helen,” Gansey objects.

“The desert seems preferable, sometimes,” Adam says mildly, “to a graduate thesis. But, no. After the seminary is ordination. Laying on of hands.”

“Seems like they’d want to change that name,” Helen says. “All things considered.”

_“Helen_,” Gansey says again, scandalized.

“Oh, don’t be so puritanical,” she says. “I’m just saying, somebody should consider the _optics_. Like, the Vatican could afford _one _publicist. No offense.”

“I’m aware of the irony.” Adam lifts a shoulder, shrugs crookedly. To Gansey, he says, “You’d like the ordination ceremony. Lots of kissing rings and bespoke chalices.”

“And feet washing,” Ronan says.

“And feet washing,” Adam agrees, and the side of his mouth tugs into a smile. “If that’s your thing.”

“Also lots of centuries of excluding women,” Helen says. She is clearly taking great delight in being a bummer.

“Helen,” Gansey laments.

“No, it’s okay,” Adam says. He’s got one leg propped up on his chair, and he rests his chin on his knee. “You’re right. There’s a lot of shitty tradition. But coming out of high school, it was this or the military recruiter, so I figured-“

He shrugs, then grimaces.

“That was a, uh, a joke.”

“Well thank goodness for that,” Helen says. She gives Adam a smile that is all Gansey—charming, a sort of apologetic power—and lifts her drink to him, as if to toast him. “I’m sorry. I’m being difficult. I guess this will be good practice for when you’re at the pulpit.”

“Oh, I won’t preach” Adam says. His free hand touches his left ear. “I’ll do scholarly research or translations or something.”

Gansey seizes upon this graciously. “I’ve always fancied the memetic lifestyle. Copying over scripture and balancing on pillars all day. Although I imagine it’s a bit lonely in actuality, locked away from the world like that?”

Adam’s shoulder lifts, drops. “Could be part of the appeal.”

“Celibacy, though,” Helen says sadly, and her brother releases his most resounding and reproving _Helen!!! _yet.

“Come see the sheep,” Ronan suggests, and Adam swings gratefully to his feet. They go and see the sheep.

Sometime later, they are tramping through a dark field, in search of a rope swing that only Matthew can remember but swears exists. The night is noisy with frog-song and insects. Gansey’s teeth are white in the dark, grinning.

He puts out his fist in a way that means _good_? Ronan knocks his knuckles in a way that means _good_.

“The moon!” Matthew says, in a way that means only _look_.

They look. The moon is close and bright. Ronan’s throat closes around the solid, impassible way he loves this place. It’s a love that used to turn him choking and cruel, but he’s learned to swallow around it.

“It doesn’t seem quite real, does it?” Gansey says quietly to Adam. Their heads are close together, turned up at the sky. “All of it.”

“I keep thinking,” Adam’s voice is weighty with his Henrietta accent, and he’s laughing sort of incredulously, “how I grew up fifteen minutes from here. Fifteen minutes from just- the _farthest _thing.”

They cannot find the rope swing and after a while Matthew shrugs and says peacefully, “Oh, actually, maybe I was thinking of a book.”

“Jesus Christ, Matthew,” Ronan says.

“The girl dies at the end,” Matthew says.

“_Bridge to Terabithia_,” Gansey suggests.

“Hmm,” says Matthew, “maybe.”

They start back across the fields, skirting carefully around Goose Territory, and Gansey puts his one of his much-beloved boat shoes down into a cowpat and says very sadly, “Yeehaw.” It makes Ronan laugh until his ribs threaten to crush in, accordion-like, with one last wheeze of joy.

…

Afterwards, Ronan drives Adam home in the sleek black BMW. Adam’s shirt smells like bonfire and so does his skin. Ronan puts the windows down and drives one-handed, never putting a foot to the brake. Adam imagines he’s driven this road all his life, imagines the Lynch brothers as children sleeping in the back of a car, heads swinging gently with each curve in the road.

Ronan asks, “Where’d you live before St. Agnes?”

Adam says, “Somewhere else.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“It wasn’t,” Adam says, “the kind of place you stay.”

It’s the truest thing he can say, but Ronan laughs like he’s annoyed. “You’re shit at answering questions.”

Adam watches the road before them—a bell of light from the low BMW headlights, an encroaching darkness—and feels his insufficiency, his inscrutability.

“Don’t ask me questions if you don’t like the answers.”

“I’m trying to make fucking civil conversation.”

“Yeah, I can tell civility’s real big with you all.” It comes out bitter and loaded with Henrietta, with trailer park hurt. The car bursts past a wall of wilted rhodedendrons, their scent garish and elderly.

“What,” says Ronan, “you’re pissed ‘cause Helen Gansey hurt your feelings? So’s everyone else she’s ever met.”

“No,” Adam says, feeling foolish and furious. His anger is greater than that, less concentrated.

He is angry because his clothes will smell like smoke until he can scrounge enough change to get to the laundromat. He is angry about the lightning-struck dogwood and the loving sweep of Ronan’s eyes over his yellowed land. He is angry about kind, princely Gansey and the afternoon they spent in the graveyard—the casual magic of Gansey’s stories, his pleasure at Adam’s questions.

He is angry for his freshman self—Adam Parrish, scholarship student, wheeling a bike home, checking his sweater cuffs lest a speck of dust betray him for the trailer trash he is—for ever thinking he could match the strides of these bronze-plated men.

“Whatever, Parrish,” Ronan says. Then he swears and brakes hard, flinging out his arm in front of Adam like a soccer mom. The car shivers, fishtails, halts. “What the _fuck_, man?”

This inquiry is directed not at Adam, but at the small animal pinned between headlights, watching with reproachful yellow eyes. Ronan lets his arm drop, strikes the horn with the heel of his palm.

“Move, dumbass.”

After several long seconds, the fox steps deliberately out of the puddling headlights, disappearing into the darkness of the roadside. Adam breathes out.

“I fucking hate foxes,” he says, so fervently that Ronan’s eyes turn sideways. Adam feels suddenly fifteen, shiveringly aware of eyes on a bruise he cannot cover, of fingerprints visible on his wrist because his betraying body has outgrown all his sleeves. He says, “It’s fine. Drive.”

Ronan’s knee moves. The car moves. The headlights illuminate empty road and empty road. Ronan’s eyes ricochet off Adam and return.

“My dad hit a fox with his truck once,” Adam says eventually. “Kinda like that. We were pulling down our road at night. He didn’t have time to stop and we hit it.”

It wasn’t a road, really, only the stretch of worn-away grass leading to the trailer park. Adam’s father had sworn.

Ronan has both hands on the wheel now, a curious stillness to the way he’s holding his head—listening. They come to the first stoplight Adam’s seen all night, a crossroads of empty black pavement.

“I was seven,” he says, fixes his eyes on the light as it shifts yellow, red. “I snuck back out to see if it- I don’t know why. I knew it was dead. It made a- noise. When we hit it.”

Green light, now. Ronan’s hand moves against the stickshift.

“Anyway it wasn’t there,” Adam says. “It was gone. I guess it was only hurt, played dead ’til we were gone. But it scared the shit out of me.”

“Lo,” Ronan says, “the tomb was empty.”

The light ahead of them blinks red.

“Not everything,” Adam says, “is about God, you know.”

“Not a very priestly thing to say,” Ronan says—not with reproach, but interest—and he turns his head to consider Adam frankly as they wait for the light to change. Adam wants to put his hand to face, cover some imagined bruise.

There is a second fox story. Adam was older, although still young enough to venture into the garage with his father, to sit under the pained, half-lidded gaze of the pin-up posters and pass his father tools. Young enough to still be surprised when his father hit him.

Afterwards, his father went back to the trailer and Adam sat on the stained concrete floor of the garage and cried—less from pain than humiliation. And when he lifted his face from his huddled knees, there was a fox sitting in the open mouth of the garage, watching him like a cat, frank and pitiless.

He says, “I’m not a priest yet.”

“But you want to be?”

Adam is startled—startled like walking into the ring of praying trees, like watching Matthew light the plywood pyre—to lift his eyes and find himself so shrewdly observed. He holds Ronan’s gaze, watches the light shift and turn him ghastly.

“Light’s green.”

It is. Ronan lifts his foot off the brake, finally turns away. Asks, lightly, “So you think you’re being stalked by a zombie fox that you wronged?”

Adam lets himself smile—more because he is grateful for the levity than because the joke was especially funny. He puts his head back against the seat and squints his eyes shut tight.

“Probably its grandchildren by now. It’s a generational feud.”

“Say the word,” the whisper of Ronan’s hands sliding against the wheel, graceful and instinctual, “and I’ll turn us around, go tear that fox’s shit up.”

“Big talk, considering you near swerved us off the road to avoid hitting him.”

“Didn’t want to hurt the paint job. Fuck off.”

After that, they drive silently. Adam closes his eyes and lets himself imagine dozing off in the back of a family car, head swinging low, following the familiar gravity of the road home. It’s a nice thing to imagine. He holds it close as long as he can, until the car slows and Ronan’s hand finds his shoulder.

“Adam?”

“I’m awake.”

He climbs out of the car and Ronan does, too. He folds his arms on the BMW’s roof, rests his face on his arms. They consider each other over the car’s sleek back.

“I’d invite you up,” Adam lifts his chin towards the church’s spiny silhouette, “but it’s pretty cramped quarters with all the gargoyles and hunchbacked orphans.”

Then, when Ronan continues to stare, “Right, I forgot you didn’t read _Hunchback of Notre Dame_. I’ll come up with a better church joke.”

“Would you?”

“What?”

“Invite me up,” Ronan says, not smiling, not suggesting anything. Just asking. The thought of him walking stooped through Adam’s tiny attic room, through the tiny accumulations of his life, is jarring—a plunking wrong note. Adam’s hand seeks purchase, finds the open door of the BMW, grips.

He says, apologetic, “It’s not the kind of place you invite people into.”

“Okay,” Ronan says, simple, not disappointed or offended or anything. He knocks his knuckles against the roof of the car. “See you?”

“Yeah,” says Adam. “See you.”

...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay I think this is the first chapter I haven't had to include Several footnotes re latin translation, biblical allusion. that's very hot and secular of me 
> 
> anyway I hope this does some work to at least begin to unpack Adam's relationship w religion. I have a lot of complicated inarticulate thoughts about the lines between magic and miracle. ps Helen Gansey owns my ass I hope you can tell
> 
> anyway thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed - lmk if you have a fave line or scene or anything!! it would mean a lot to me :) or come and talk to me on [tumblr](https://charactershoesfic.tumblr.com) especially if you wanna discuss CDTH!!!


	4. iv

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> several stories about the Lynch brothers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I almost posted a 7k chapter just bc I am so excited for a certain scene, so plz appreciate my restraint and enjoy this 4k chapter about Brothers Having Feelings
> 
> tw for discussion of violence and an allusion to recreational drug usage

“What can I say about Declan and Ashley,” Matthew stands before Ronan and Gansey at the kitchen table, spreads his hands grandly. Waits. “Oh, no, that’s not the start of my speech. I’m asking. What do I say about them?”

“Oh, _Matthew_,” says Gansey, putting down his mug of coffee. His eyebrows make a mournful shape that is usually reserved only for Ronan’s very worst offenses. He is still rumpled with sleep, but Helen has already put him to work folding placecards in accordance with one of her bristling spreadsheets.

“Complacency,” Ronan says. He wakes early now, a side-effect of dropping out of high school to become an Actual Farmer, but for the last hour he’s been dozing on the squashy couch in the den. “Hypocrisy. Human embodiment of the word _smarm. _Fuckin _chintz_. Also, pig shit.”

“Ronan,” says Gansey pleasantly. “Please.”

“Ripped up Mom’s wedding dress,” Ronan adds. He holds out his hands to Matthew. “Just give me the clipboard. It’s faster if I write.”

Matthew dodges away, gets distracted by food, returns with a handful of snap peas from the pile Ronan collected this morning. He’s been visiting the overgrown vegetable garden more frequently now that summer is dying, trying to harvest every soft bit of life before the overnight frosts begin. Matthew crunches noisily but allows Ronan to steal a pod, crisp and rubbery, from his cupped hand.

“Read us what you have so far,” Gansey prompts. At Matthew’s grimace, he says incredulously, “Nothing? Matthew, it’s _Wednesday_. The rehearsal dinner is tomorrow.”

“I’ve had a lot going on,” Matthew says woefully, as though he has not spent the past week leaving dishes all over the house and sleeping in inopportune places. “I had to plan the bachelor party.”

“Maybe the wedding won’t happen,” Ronan says hopefully.

“Don’t say that,” Gansey says. “Helen will have a depressive episode.”

“So I thought I’d start,” Matthew says, “with that time Declan almost drowned me.”

“Landscapers are here,” Ashley announces, swinging into the room. “They want to know if there’s anywhere that’s off limits. Like, you didn’t bury anything dangerous in the ground, did you?”

“Just the landmines,” Ronan says. Ashley scowls. “Wait, the geese pond. That part isn’t a joke. Tell them to watch out for the geese.”

“Wonderful,” says Ashley. She makes to go chase down the landscapers, then turns back. “The tailor will be here at one. _One oh clock_, did I enunciate that clear enough? Nod your head yes, Ronan. Matthew? Thank you.”

“Condescending,” Ronan adds, makes another grab for Matthew’s pen. “C-o-n-d-“

“Do you have any fun stories about Declan and Ashley as a couple?” Gansey prompts, fingers pressed to his temple in a way that suggests his Manic Type-A Teaching Assistant brain is very disturbed by Matthew’s current level of chill. “Anecdotes always perform well.”

Matthew considers, crunches some peas. “I always kinda thought he’d marry an older woman. Like, much older. Is that something?”

“No,” says Gansey fervently. Then, “I did always feel like he was trying to seduce my mother.”

“Ashley’s nice,” Matthew says, a cheerful nonsequitor. “One time when Declan was still at Aglionby, I walked in on them having sex.”

“Oh, fuck this,” Ronan says immediately, staggering out of his chair so hastily he knocks it to the floor. He has to raise his voice over the sound of a fleet of lawnmowers starting their engines outside, repeat himself: “Fuck. This.”

“Feel better?” Gansey says.

He doesn’t, actually. He’s thinking of landscapers roaming all the soft, overgrown corners of the Barns. Thinking of the last snap peas of the season, of the encroaching chill of fall. Ronan rights the chair, then knocks it over again.

“It’s just mowers,” Matthew says soothingly. “Nobody’s gonna touch your shit or cut down your trees, man.”

Ronan gives the chair a kick, for good measure. “I’m going- somewhere else.”

“Don’t be late for the suit fitting,” Gansey begs.

Ronan crosses the shorn fields to his favorite barn, the old white-washed one where his father kept a little office. Ronan and Declan used to play in the dusty alcove, spinning on the office chair, lifting the phone from its cradle and speaking authoritative nonsense to the dial tone.

_Tell him he can go to hell_, Declan would instruct. Ronan would duly relay, _Declan says you can go to hell._

Sometimes—if they caught their father in a good mood, if they arrived bearing a fresh can of Diet Coke, beaded with cold condensation—he could be bullied into telling stories. He would sit in his office chair, pull Ronan into his lap, let his face transform into the face of an animated stranger.

“Now, did I ever tell ya,” he would begin, “about the time I bested that bastard Antaeus?”

Niall’s stories—like the curios he peddled—were rarely original pieces. Instead, he borrowed cheerfully from local legend and ancient myth. He invented the parts he couldn’t remember. The protagonists always bore some resemblance to him, their handsome lying father.

Ronan was often in the stories, too: a furious rainstorm, a clamoring bell, a snarling dog.

When he steps into the dusty little office, there is a brief and tilting moment where he sees a man in a chair, a bowed black head over a sheaf of papers, and thinks—_Dad_. But it’s only Declan, looking up at the interruption.

“What the fuck,” says Ronan, and for once his intention is not to anger his brother. He is surprised.

“I’m revising my vows,” Declan says irritably. “I can’t find a quiet corner in this place.”

“Whose fault is that,” Ronan says. Declan does not answer, only frowns down at his yellow legal pad, and Ronan feels suddenly off-kilter. He came here with the intention of kicking at the grain bins until he broke something and now he feels suddenly directionless. “Shouldn’t you be consulting, like, a lawyer or something?”

“You’re thinking of the prenup,” Declan says, eyes on his pad. “That’s already been handled. Don’t look so fucking scandalized, Ronan. It’s good business practice, that’s all. Ashley and I were both in favor.”

“Mom and Dad didn’t have one,” Ronan says, and then feels a lurch of uncertainty—a sudden twist of _young_ that he only ever gets around cool-eyed, _good business practice _Declan. Under Declan’s gaze, his furies turn petulant, his fierce loves turn treacly. “Did they?”

“No,” Declan says, puts down his pen. “Dad didn’t talk to Mom about money. But Ashley and I don’t intend to have a marriage like theirs.”

“What’s that supposed to mean.”

“It means we’re partners. Not-“ He must see something stormy in Ronan’s face, and for once he takes heed of the warnings. Frowns down at his legal pad and crosses something out and then sneezes noisily. He says, “Nobody’s dusted in here in—and this is me being kind—fifteen years.”

Ronan doesn’t disagree. He knows that if he crossed the room to the wastebasket, it would be full of discarded scraps of paper, marked all over in his father’s irregular hand, and empty coke cans. He imagines any drippings of the sweet soda have gone warm and crystalized by now, formed some unholy amber.

He says, “It’s Dad’s office.”

Meaning, _that’s Dad’s chair. _Meaning, _that’s Dad’s pen_. Meaning, _for a second I thought you were—_

Declan says, “Ashley says this place is like a mausoleum.”

Ronan is pleased by this, secretly. One of Niall’s best stories had been about a boy who grew up in a graveyard, mothered by ghosts, tucked warmly between the shelves of a crypt each night. He would beg his father again and again for that story, even though it inevitably gave him strange and throbbing nightmares.

“She can leave a fucking Yelp review if she’s so dissatisfied,” he says, drifts to consider the posters pinned to the wall. An advertisement for a feis to celebrate the Feast of Saint Brigid. An overexposed photograph of two boys by the sea.

“I think she probably meant _shrine_,” Declan says. “She’s a bit imprecise in her language.”

“Put _that_ in your fucking vows.”

Ronan sifts through a curl of old receipts, bleached unreadable by the sun, considering the impossible landscape of his father’s signature—the great bold N, the pinched A, the crooked L.

“I just mean,” Declan says, and then breaks off. Puts down the pad. “Do you remember the story- The boy who lived in the graveyard.”

Ronan turns. This memory hangs between them, like so much dust in the air.

He says, “Yeah.”

Declan says, “And at the end, he’d have to leave and go be with the living. The skeleton guy would say, _you can’t live a life among dead things_.”

For a second, his voice takes on a new timbre—the fast, mouthy brogue of their fast and mouthy father. Ronan experiences again that tilting moment of remembering, moving through a moment cast in amber.

He says, “I think he was a ghost, actually. The dog was a skeleton.”

“Spector,” Declan says, almost smiles. “I always thought he was meant to be Matthew.”

“He was going through a chewing phase,” Ronan agrees.

“And you were the boy,” Declan says without envy or grudge. “You were always the boy in the stories.”

Ronan’s hands move aimlessly across the wall behind him, catching on bits of chipped paint, places where Niall pressed a thumbtack into the wall without care. In this dusty place, it is hard to distinguish old grief from new grief. _You can’t live a life among dead things_.

“It’s his office,” he says finally, as simply as he can. In all the life they’ve lived as brothers, they have not quite learned how to speak each other’s language. “I’ll fucking dust once in a while, is that what you want me to say?”

The lightbulb overhead is clouded with dried moths. Declan’s mouth is an unconvinced line.

“I’ll hire someone to fucking dust,” he amends.

Declan says, “I know you’ve got a thing about forgetting. I can’t exactly blame you after Mom, but-“

“Fuck you.”

“I only meant-“

Ronan turns and leaves without another word, because he can’t actually think of a single word to say. He returns to his original course of action and kicks furiously at the huge, hollow grain bins until the high roof is shaking with thunderous _booms_, until he feels less razor-edged.

“Honestly, Ronan.” Declan watches for a moment from the doorway, arms crossed in tight disapproval, and then he retreats to the office.

Ronan climbs into the hayloft, stooping beneath the eaves, briefly startling a nest of birds into flying at his head. The roof overhead is disastrous at this point—the sun pours through, puddles in the warm masses of hay.But it’s a job for next week, once the wedding horrors have abated and Ronan can breathe in his own home again.

For now, he finds himself a sunny spot and flings his body down into the scratchy, sweet-smelling hay. Up here, the roar of the landscapers is dulled to a hum, like an irritable fly buzzing in the rafters. Ronan closes his eyes against it.

Apart from the graveyard story, Niall’s story of Antaeus was always Ronan’s favorite.

Antaeus was the son of Mother Earth, or alternatively the son of some bastard back in Belfast who Niall never liked the looks of, and he was said to draw his strength from the ground. So long as his feet could touch the ground, rumor had it, he was invincible.

“So what’d I do?” Niall would ask them, his can of Coke dripping condensation down Ronan’s neck. “I picked the lad up. Squeezed him as tight as my arms could bear. Crushed him ’til his feet dangled. Not so strong once I got him off the ground, was he?”

Ronan and Declan would crow and cheer and they would clatter out into the yard to chase the chickens, to find Matthew and lift him off the ground like Antaeus until he spoiled the fun by laughing and kicking his feet.

Still, privately, when Ronan went out on one of his solitary wanderings, he was not his father. Instead he was Antaeus, burying his fingers to the second knuckle in the black earth, drawing strength through the soles of his bare feet.

…

He is late for the suit fitting, obviously, and itching from his nap in the dusty straw. Declan is irritable and not speaking to Ronan, which is probably for the best.

Gansey makes a face at Ronan, probably to indicate that Ronan smells like a barn. Ronan makes a face back to indicate that Gansey smells like his father—a sore spot, because Gansey II insists on gifting his son a bottle of his own personal expensive cologne every Christmas, and Gansey is too dutiful a son to do the sensible thing and regift it. Gansey’s face indicates that this is a low blow. To apologize for it, Ronan asks Gansey his opinion on the length of his cuffs, sparking a spirited fifteen-minute debate between Gansey and the tailor.

“For God’s sake,” Ashley says, “it’s a quarter of an inch.”

Declan and Gansey shoot her equally dismayed looks. She puts up her hands in surrender.

“Okay, I’ll go fuck myself.”

The afternoon continues in this harried, itchy manner—wave after wave of tiresome errands. In the evening, Ashley is semi-kidnapped by a van full of her bridesmaids. Matthew distributes custom-made shot glasses with Declan’s face printed on them. Gansey produces a bottle of very old, very expensive Scotch that seems to please Declan.

“It’s from all of us,” he says graciously, and Ronan and Matthew exchange equally bewildered glances.

Declan’s official bachelor party was several weeks ago in DC—thrown by some of his DC intern friends—and seemed to involve a lot of jocular JCrew models and elaborate sushi sculptures and probably a great quantity of cocaine. Matthew, not yet twenty-one, insisted on throwing Declan a second, “down home” party. His plans, from what Ronan has gleaned, seem to involve a lot less coke and a lot more drunken bacon sandwiches eaten in a deli parking lot at two-am.

Two of Declan’s groomsmen, smarmy Georgetown alum with overgroomed eyebrows, have come down for the party. They are virtually indistinguishable white men in quarter-zip fleeces who laugh a lot and call things “legendary” and refer to Declan as “D.”

“Be good,” Gansey says in an undertone.

“I’m Martha fucking Stewart,” Ronan says grimly, and starts drinking.

They sip at the very old Scotch while Declan’s friends say douchey things about _bouquet _and _body_. They let Matthew bully them all into taking shots from the Declan-themed shot glasses.

They end up in one of the bars that Ronan and Gansey occasionally frequented as Aglionby students—known not for its rustic decor or vaguely racist atmosphere, but for its lax ID policies. It is, unsurprisingly, filled with a great number of Aglionby students, returning for the coming school year. Ronan is reminded, again, that is August is ending. It fills him with a kind of urgency that he can’t name.

“God,” Gansey says, “were we that young once? I refuse to believe we were that young once.”

“We should hustle them at pool,” Ronan says.

“That,” Gansey says, “would be unethical.”

They make an easy forty bucks, buy a round of shots for the group. Matthew queues up the jukebox to play Neil Diamond’s _Forever in Blue Jeans _eleven times, then starts quizzing Declan on, hypothetically, how he might like his best man’s speech to go. At this point, Gansey herds them out into the Henrietta night.

Another bar. Declan’s douchey friends present him with a sash that reads KISS ME - IM GROOMED. Matthew is huddled over some napkins at the bar, scribbling frantic addendums to his speech. Gansey breaks off mid-sentence, hand clutching at Ronan’s arm in a silent panic beneath the table, and then he’s saying broadly:

“Jane! Of all the gin joints, et cetera.”

“No gin, dude,” says the waitress, looking smaller and somehow even more ill-tempered than their last encounter. She’s bearing two big pitchers of alarmingly blue liquid. Also, she’s got about four plastic drinking straws tucked into her hair. “This is a beer joint, if we’re being generous.”

“You work here?” Ronan asks, because she’s wearing an apron but she’s also wearing, like, hideous knitted leg warmers. The apron may well be an aesthetic choice.

“No,” says the waitress, stares him down. “I willingly spend my Thursday nights serving alcohol to minors. I _love _watered down well drinks and sticky bathroom floors. Maybe if I’m _lucky_ I’ll step into the crossfire of some rich kid family feud and get my face bashed open again!”

“That,” Gansey says, “was very unfortunate-“

“Oh, _unfortunate_!”

“Looks kinda badass, though,” Ronan says.

She lifts a middle finger at him in a sort of friendly gesture. Nods at his mostly-healed nose. “Met your true love yet?”

“I’ll keep you posted.”

“Hey,” says Quarter-Zip Josh in an unnecessarily loud voice. He waves at the waitress with both hands, like maybe he’s trying to communicate with her through, like, nautical signals. “Hey, ma’am?”

“Ma’am,” says Gansey, with a sort of wondering delight. The waitress’ face does something stormy.

“My friend over here is getting married this weekend.” Quarter-Zip Josh makes some nautical signals at Declan, who sort of grimaces and ducks his head. “Can he get a free drink for his last night of freedom?”

“Oh, good God,” Gansey says. He starts looking around the bar, like he might somehow diffuse Quarter-Zip Josh’s douchey comment with a particularly choice bit of rural chic decor—a _Moose Crossing _sign, perhaps, or a fluorescent _Budweiser _sign with half the bulbs burnt out.

“Freedom!” the waitress gasps, puts her hand to her heart. She sloshes a considerable bit of blue drink onto her shoes and ugly leg warmers, but it doesn’t slow her down. Her voice has taken on an extra twang of Henrietta, as resonant as a preacher. “Why, young man, is this a shotgun wedding? Are you being _dragged _down the aisle?”

Ronan is having a great time. Matthew, still scribbling furiously at his napkin, hoots a laugh. Quarter-Zip Josh’s nautical gestures start to deflate, signaling distress. Declan aims for a smile, mostly just shows his teeth uncomfortably.

“Nice to see you again,” he says. “It appears your lip is healing well. That was a very unfortunate-“

“Oh, unfortunate!”

Ronan is having the _best _time.

“We’ll pay for the drink,” Gansey says tactfully, lifts his feet to dodge another wave of blue drink from the waitress’ pitcher. “You can put it on my tab. And one for yourself, for your trouble-“

“Oh, no trouble,” the waitress says, sweetly acid, and goes off to deliver to the pitchers of blue drink—now half-empty—to a table of underaged raven boys.

She comes back with another round, sliding glasses expertly across the sticky Formica so that Declan and his douchey friends have to lunge to stop their drinks from sliding off the tabletop. She puts Gansey and Ronan’s drinks down more gently, but only just. Matthew gets a glass full of maraschino cherries and a look of benevolence.

“Thank you, Jane,” Gansey says meekly.

“It’s Blue, for the last time. Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Quarter-Zip Josh ventures, looking slightly chastened, “could I trouble you for a straw?”

She considers him. “You hear about the turtles?”

“The- turtles?”

“The turtles are dying, buddy,” she tells him solemnly. Fishes a straw out of her hair.

“I’ll-“ Quarter-Zip Josh is entirely cowed. The nautical flags are gone now. “I’ll just drink from the glass.”

“Brave of you,” says the waitress. Tucks the straw back in her hair. “The turtles owe you a debt.”

She leaves and Gansey exhales something between a forlorn sigh and a hysterical laugh, eyes following Blue back to the bar. He begins to drink his beer very rapidly. Ronan watches, enjoyment diminishing.

“You weren’t kidding about the local color,” Quarter-Zip Marco says to Declan, and they exchange some hearty shoulder slaps. Ronan is not having a good time.

He goes and stands in the bathroom, feeling off-kilter and lockjaw. He misses the days when he played Gansey’s snarling dog—_stay back, stay back_. He misses the days when he flung himself across tables, when he split his knuckles open in every strip-mall parking lot in Henrietta. Now, he is a blunted instrument. He hasn’t figured out another way to deal with this strange and directionless anger, so instead it just hangs heavy from his windpipe. He wants to say something cruel to Gansey about the waitress. He wants a drink, but if he drinks he will fight his brother.

Declan and Quarter-Zip Marco burst noisily into the restroom, piss at the urinals. Declan lingers at the sink, considering Ronan’s reflection in the mirror as the door swings shut behind Marco, locking out the noise of the bar.

“He didn’t wash his hands,” Ronan says. “Fucking gross.”

Declan doesn’t immediately say anything, takes his time washing his hands, drying them, balling the paper towel. Ronan lifts his eyebrows at him, prompting. Already the pulse beneath his jaw is quickening in anticipation of a fight. _Hit me_.

“You’re behaving very well,” Declan says at last, and they are both bewildered both the statement. His hands make an abortive gesture. “I only mean. You’re behaving well.”

“Because it doesn’t really matter,” Ronan says truthfully.

Declan’s eyebrows come together. _Tell them to go to hell_, he used to say, and Ronan would relay the message, slam the phone down. He nods a couple times.

“That’s nice,” he says. “That’s real nice, Ronan.”

Ronan can’t think of anything to say. He has landed a blow he didn’t intend—like when they play-wrestled as kids and his fist struck unexpected nose. For a second, there is the panic of _don’t tell Mom don’t tell Mom just get a tissue it’ll stop bleeding soon_.

He says, “I just mean it’s not- real.”

Declan’s mouth makes a straight line. He drops the crumpled paper towel into the trash. The quiet working of his jaw suggests he is doing mental math, considering the words most likely to get Ronan pushing off the counter, to accelerate this car crash. This is their only common tongue.

“As opposed to,” he says, “the- just the _pristine _example of marital bliss we grew up in, right? Because _that _was real, right?”

“Don’t-“

“He cheated on her all the time, you know that? You can hoard his papers all you want, it doesn’t change it. You treat them like they were-”

“Our _parents_,” Ronan says furiously. “Our fucking parents.”

Declan’s mouth does something tight and curling that Ronan recognizes, and for a second he thinks—_boom_. Thinks of the backroom at Nino’s, of every ill-lit parking lot in town. Thinks it’d fucking show Declan, wouldn’t it, if they both sported black eyes in all the wedding photos.

But Declan doesn’t hit him. Just knocks his knuckles against the counter once, lets his fingers unfold, and leaves Ronan in the bathroom to consider his reflection, his unbloodied nose.****

…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank god blue is back, writing about men is so boring idk why I do it
> 
> Niall's stories are both stolen--blame him not me--the first from Neil Gaiman's "The Graveyard Book" and the second from the myth of Antaeus, a Greek myth turned Irish by the poet [Seamus Heaney](http://www.ashokkarra.com/2016/10/seamus-heaney-antaeus/) turned Ronan!core by me. this fic is so goddamn self-indulgent
> 
> anyway plz leave me ur thoughts and any favorite lines/moments! im SO excited for next chapter y'all dont even know!! also there's a fic post on my [tumblr](https://charactershoesfic.tumblr.com) if you want to reblog or say hi to me!!!


	5. v

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a brief story about Ronan Lynch and an act of contrition

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh guys this is the big one *leans against giant pic of hot priest* we're really in it now
> 
> tw for mentions of attempted suicide, reference to child abuse, a lot of discussion of longterm effects of that abuse. as always, feel free to message me and I can tell you when to stop/start reading to avoid these bits! 
> 
> (also if it's not clear, this chapter picks up on the same night as the last, after Ronan leaves the bachelor party)

…

St. Agnes is dim and still—lit only by the chancel lamp, burning perpetually before the tabernacle. Ronan’s hand gropes for the Holy Water font. He sketches a genuflect in the dark, unsure who the gesture is intended for.

A brief story about Ronan Lynch: once, sixteen and drunk and half-orphaned, he spread himself out on a St. Agnes pew and committed himself to bleeding out. Noah found him in time, but he couldn’t erase that Ronan had done it. The marks on his wrists faded—remarkably neat white lines—but the hugeness of his act did not diminish.

Gansey asked him afterwards why he did it and Ronan said he didn’t know. To Gansey it had been an insufficient answer, but it was true; perhaps Ronan’s oldest truth—his own unknowability.

He’s always felt it most acutely in church—that throb of _what am I _and _why am I—_and perhaps that’s why he stopped going. Now, he considers himself a mostly-healed thing. It is wretched to step into this dim place and feel immediately seventeen, bending his knee to some question he cannot ask.

_Please._

With a Zippo fished from his jeans, he lights the three rows of candles that stand beneath his favorite stained glass window—Mary, deceptively blank-eyed, crushing the snake beneath her foot. The host of tiny flames turn her crimson, turn the empty church shifting and shadowy.

Ronan steps into the empty wooden confessional, hugs his knees to his chest, fumbles at prayer. The only word that comes is _please_.

“Ronan?”

The sacristy door is open. Ronan knows him by his silhouette—the careful lift of his chin, the elegant hand that lifts to press knuckle to eye socket—and by his sloping Henrietta vowels.

He says, “Why’re you here?”

“I live here,” Adam says. He moves quietly out of the doorway, into the dim church. The candlelight catches in the planes of his face. Ronan is a wretched thing, crushed beneath some godly heel.

He says, “_Here_, though.”

Adam stops before him, feet bare against the tile. His white undershirt bares a beautiful neck. The side up his mouth turns up. “I saw your car. Had to piss?”

“Praying,” Ronan says.

Adam’s eyes flick, appraise. He says, “I can go.”

Ronan says, “Don’t.”

Adam’s shoulder lifts, drops. He moves soundlessly away. Ronan loses track of him for a moment in the darkness, then registers the creak of a bench on the other side of the confessional. A shadowed profile behind the grate.

“I’m not going to confess,” Ronan says sharply.

“I’m just sitting.”

“I’d probably burst into flames anyway.”

“Compelling evidence to the hypothesis that there is, in fact, a God.”

Ronan puts his head back against the wooden panel, feeling desperate and off-kilter. He turns up his palms and inspects the pale undersides of his wrists, the paler scars. He doesn’t regret making them and he doesn’t regret Noah finding him, waking him. He is not a regretful creature—only a thing caught in its own bramble, thrashing against itself without recognition.

He says, “I think I forget how to pray.”

“It’s just conversation.” 

“This might shock you,” Ronan tells the grate, “but I’m bad at that.”

“Just pretend you’re talking to me.”

“That’s worse. Stop trying to make me confess shit.”

“I can’t perform Reconciliation,” Adam says. “Only priests can. Also I don’t believe in it.”

“In what,” Ronan says, “the sacrament?”

“Forgiveness,” Adam’s cool voice says. Then, an amendment, “Indiscriminate forgiveness, at least.”

Ronan is thankful for the wall between them, the metal grate. He thinks if he looked into Adam’s face—impassive, unforgiving—he might never tear his eyes away. The sight might sear permanently against his eyelids, an aftershock of light every time he blinks.

“My dad used to say Confession was the humanest thing God ever did for us poor bastards,” Ronan tells the dark church. “He’d tell stories about working as a sin-eater in Belfast during the Troubles. Families’d pay him to eat food so their dead rebel sons could get into heaven with clear souls. He said he’d never had cake before that.”

Adam’s voice is careful but unyielding, “Is that true?’

“Probably not. He was a liar.”

“You talk about him a lot.”

“He was my dad,” Ronan says, defensive, thinking of Declan’s flatline mouth. _You can’t live a life among dead things_. “Normal people talk about their families.”

Quiet. The candles tremble orange. Ronan can imagine Adam’s look of cool scorn, thrilling and sorrowing at once. He can imagine Adam ducking out of the confessional and disappearing into the black church on silent bare feet. Just another score in the ground for Ronan to step over this winter, when the earth freezes and he’s alone again.

Then, very slow and deliberate, “My family weren’t church people. I probably stepped foot here once, twice, before I was sixteen. And that was just for funerals.”

Ronan casts his eyes to the dim silhouette on the other side of the confessional grate, the upright head and the fine, long nose—grim and graceful, at once. He feels sorry for the jab, but he’d be sorrier still if Adam stopped talking. He grips his fingers around the wooden bench, holds himself still.

“Things were getting bad at home by then,” Adam says evenly. “I was getting hit a lot. I didn’t have anywhere to go. The church let me rent the room cheap if I helped out in the parish office sometimes.”

Ronan thinks of Adam standing in the praying circle, fair and uncanny, his elegant knuckles pressed into the hollow of eye socket. His face turned towards the open window in the car, careful voice saying _it wasn’t the kind of place you stay_.

“You don’t owe me this,” he says, penitent. “I was being a dick.”

“We’re having a conversation,” Adam says, and his voice is light and Ronan thinks he might be terrified. “We’re just talking. Do you think you’re like your dad?”

“I’m not a liar,” Ronan says. Thinks of the wastebasket full of Coke cans, amberized soda. “The rest- I don’t know.”

He won’t leave, at any rate. He will stay where his father could not. He is not Odysseus or Niall Lynch, but Antaeus—a rooted thing, a dangling thing.

“I worry,” Adam says, and the confession does not match his calm and quiet voice. “I worry that I am.”

Ronan wants to tell him, again, of the blackened dogwood tree struck by lightning—of his mother’s refusal to let Niall cut it down—of the first spring it bloomed again—of his mother’s arms full of white blooms, filling every room, her silent triumph. He wants to tell Adam that he nearly clawed himself to death in this church once, and that now he can stand still among the calves as they lip, unafraid, at his palms.

He says, “You’re not.”

Adam laughs a little, strained and disbelieving. “I’m trying to explain.”

“Okay,” Ronan says, watches the shifting light.

“You know that joke?” His voice is thinner now. “The man’s drowning and he’s very devout. It’s a church joke, so. Sorry in advance. Anyhow he prays to God to deliver him and when a boat comes to save him, he waves it off. God’s coming. Another boat. He’s waiting for God. So he drowns and wakes up in heaven and asks God, ‘Why didn’t you save me?’ And God says, ‘Didn’t you get the boats I sent you?’”

“Ha,” says Ronan, sitting still.

“I just mean- I got on a boat,” Adam says. Ronan can imagine the careful lift of his shoulder, the indifferent drop. “I had to stop kicking. I never wanted a family. I couldn’t- trust myself, I guess. And they’d pay for seminary school. They’d let me read old books, study Latin. I beat you in Latin once, you know. I dropped out a week later, but. Highest mark on the test.”

Roman’s hands grip the bench, but he recognizes the terrified grasp at levity. He says, “Must’ve been an off-week.”

“Sure thing.”

He gropes at memory, tries to place the uncanny planes of Adam’s face in a classroom, tries to fit his fine boyish wrists in the confining cuffs of an Aglionby sweater. Imagines himself turning, eyes catching on the yellow-green of a mostly healed bruise, a bowed head.

He says, “I wish I’d-“

But it’s too honest, even in a confessional—too hot with some phantom-limb nostalgia. _I wish I’d known you then_. They sit in this half-spoken sentence.

“My dad’d just died,” Ronan says. “I wasn’t, like, human.”

“I wouldn’t have let you anyhow,” Adam says, apologetic.

“Let me?”

“Sorry. I’m half-dead. Let you near, I mean. I don’t let people near.”

Ronan has to put a leather bracelet between his teeth, feeling urgent, feeling certain that anger would be easier than this flickering uncertain quiet.

“I think you’re wrong,” he says at last.

“Wrong?” Adam is amused. “About what? Latin? God?”

“Yourself. This fucking- penance you’re doing.”

“Oh.” Less amused. “Thing is, you don’t know me.”

“I’m trying,” Ronan says, teeth gritted on leather.

“I won’t let you.” It’s half an apology.

“You’re here, though.”

A noise as Adam shifts on the creaking wooden bench. He says, “Yeah, I’m- equally confused about that.”

His voice is a wonderful, folded-over kind of weary. Every vowel slow and full. Around the leather band, Ronan says, “You should go to sleep.”

Adam doesn’t answer, but there is a noise like a fist tapping against the wall between them, a genteel little knock. Then his frame fills the threshold of the confessional booth. He is disheveled and human in his sleep clothes. Ronan lets the wristband fall from his teeth.

Adam says, “Can I-“

Ronan says, _“Yes.”_ And Adam’s already got a knee on the bench, palm pressing up against the wall by Ronan’s head, and Ronan’s got a hand in the collar of Adam’s soft cotton undershirt, and for one standstill second, every candle in the church twitches, gutters—goes bright.

For all that, it’s a very careful kiss. Ronan has time to think_ Adam’s mouth _and _Adam’s smell_ and _Adam’s hands._ Ronan’s knuckles press against the rigid column of Adam’s throat and register pulse, fast and animal with fright. He has time to think _careful careful careful._

After several catastrophic breaths Adam pulls back, reassembles himself into someone sanctified, untouchable.

“Sorry,” he says, touches his mouth.

Ronan lets his head drop back against the confessional wall. Doesn’t disguise how hard he’s breathing. Lets himself look. “Thought you weren’t into that forgiveness shit.”

“You should come upstairs,” Adam says. His hand lifts, grips at the top of the doorframe. He winces, clarifies, “Not to- Just to- I can’t-“

“Okay,” Ronan says.

...

This is a love story. They blow out the rows of orange candles beneath the stained glass serpent. Then it’s very dark—only a waft of smoke, the twitching flame of the candle by the tabernacle. Adam fixes his eyes on it, reaches for that feeling of electricity that means _god _that means _holy _that means _okay You win_.

“Where’d you go?”

“Here,” Adam says.

Hand against wrist. Adam thinks of the dark-cloud moisture stain on the ceiling, an oncoming rot. Thinks of the diminishing stain of damp denim after Adam’s grandmother doused him in holy water like a bad cat. Thinks of the knock of Ronan’s skull against polished wood.

“Do you know much about Saint Agnes?”

“Like most people, jack shit.”

“_Most people_ don’t quote scripture in Latin.”

Ronan is a white-toothed presence in the dark. Adam hooks two fingers through his leather wristband, pressing into a series of indents made by teeth. He imagines he could read them like Braille—some ancient and furious language, another strange and beautiful thing about Ronan Lynch that Adam’s common hands can’t know.

He says, “She was martyred at twelve. They tried to burn her alive but it didn’t work.”

“Fucking metal.”

“Well,” Adam says, “then they beheaded her, so. Got there in the end.”

“And then you’re surprised when I say it’s hard to talk to you.”

And Adam wants to say, _no not surprised_. _Only sorry_. Wants to explain about the story of Saul, who was struck blind at the sight of God and became someone else—became Paul, became a saint. Wants to explain the ecstatic burst of pain when his head struck the railing—an encompassing silence, a sudden and remote place inside his head—and he became someone else, someone hard to touch.

He says only, lifting his face, “Where are you?”

“Here.”

Then quiet. Faces close together. Adam keeps his eyes closed after, whispers, “Come upstairs.”

The air between them is stirred with breath, with these half-whispered words. There is a feeling of tilting, knuckles nudging into something electric. Adam thinks, _god_. Thinks, _You have me. Do what You fucking will._

Ronan says, “Okay.”

Only the candle by the tabernacle left burning. The next bit conducted in silence, then—a jostle of shoulders, a finger hooked through a leather band, a pause halfway up the steep stairs to the attic.

“It’s not like where you live.”

“Okay.”

“I just want you to know that _I _know it’s not-“

“I get it.”

A hard shoulder to knock the door from its summer-swollen doorframe. Two heads bowing in unison to the low ceiling, the collected heat of an attic room. A further silence.

Afterwards, lying in the dark and considering the ceiling, “Do you even believe in God?”

Slowly, “I do. I don’t think it matters, but I do.”

“And you think He wants- _this_. From you.”

“Intellectually, the idea of God wanting anything is flawed. _Want _implies lack. _God _implies perfection, lacking nothing.”

“Just say you don’t want to answer the question.”

“I don’t want to answer the question.”

And then quiet. Adam’s got a slightly broken fan standing on the floor beside his mattress. He sets it humming, falls back against the mattress, turns his face up to consider the moisture stain on the ceiling.

“Saint Agnes is the patron saint of chastity,” he says.

Ronan laughs, sudden and bright. Adam has to turn his head and watch the way the laugh overtakes him.

“Is this immediate excommunication?” Ronan’s eyes are closed. “Or am I gonna get a summons in the mail?”

“I’m not a priest yet,” Adam says, rolls to consider the ceiling. “Probably you’ll just wake up with sigils burned into your palms or something.”

Ronan makes an appreciative noise, like he’d be open to this development. The fan rattles comfortingly. Adam watches the water stain. For a long time, that was how he thought of God—an encroachment, a spreading damp. Eventually, seventeen and tired, he put his face up the ceiling and thought_,_ _Take my hands. Take my eyes. _Saint Francis had some bit about being made an instrument of peace; Adam liked the idea of that—of being blunted, given purpose.

“Want me to leave?”

“No,” Adam says. He puts out a hand, touches the little crack in the bridge of Ronan’s nose—a wound Ronan cannot recall or will not betray. He only shrugs, reaches up as if to push Adam’s hand away and then doesn’t, just encircles his wrist and holds it gently.

“Okay.”

For a little while, Adam lets himself have this. Like sitting passenger-side in the black BMW and pretending to be young, pretending that he was nearly home and that there would be someone to carry him in when they got there. Eventually there is the noise of a car, of slamming doors, and Adam gets up and stands at the dark attic window and says, “It’s your friend.”

“I don’t have those,” Ronan says, but then he swears and starts fumbling for his shoes. “I should- This is gonna be a whole thing.”

Adam follows him down the quiet staircase, stands in the doorway and watches the dark shapes of Ronan and Gansey against the headlights. Gansey first gripping Ronan by the arms in a way that is almost childish, turning his wrists over as if to inspect them, and then socking him hard in the arm.

“Don’t make this a thing,” Ronan is suggesting.

“Oh, it’s a _fully actualized _thing.”

“Come here often?” asks a smaller shape, which Adam’s eyes assemble into the waitress from Nino’s. Her earrings are made from soda tabs. She’s got several drinking straws poking out of her hair like strange antennae.

“Most Sundays,” he says. “You?”

“Only when my mom needs, like, dirt from a churchyard. Or communion wafers.”

“Ah,” says Adam, bewildered and sleepless. He puts a hand to his mouth, to his eye. In the morning, he will still have done these things—he will still have made confession in the dark, still have kissed Ronan Lynch, half-stooped against the ceiling of his attic room.

“I have to to call Declan,” Gansey is saying, storming back towards the car now, “to assure him that you’re still _alive-“_

“Yeah, give him my sympathies,” Ronan shoots back, and then he’s a black shape between the headlights again, and then he’s back in the doorway with Adam. A dry flurry of moths orbit the single bare bulb over their heads.

Adam drawls, “Kinda looked like a thing.”

“It’s not,” Ronan says, and then can’t seem to think of anything else to say. His hand moves out, touches briefly at the inside of Adam’s wrist. “See you.”

“See you,” Adam says. Then to the waitress, less hushed, “See you.”

“Not if I see you first,” says the waitress, vaguely threatening. “My night of taxying distraught men around continues.” She gives Adam a two-fingered salute, then squints suspiciously at Ronan. “You’re not drunk, right? Nobody’s puking in my car.”

“Your car,” Ronan says, “could benefit from some puke.”

And then he’s following her out into the parking lot, cutting between the headlight beams, and Adam stands and watches them go. And then he stands there a bit longer, watching the moths bump—dusty, persistent—against the glass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> take my hands/take my eyes is of course a reference to Adam's deal w Cabeswater, but here I liken it to the "Peace Prayer of St Frances" bc the thesis of this au is that God and magic are the same thing! ok bye! 
> 
> also Blue's reference to stealing eucharist is bc once a priest told me that satanists try to steal unconsecrated hosts for Rituals and that was a thing that I just, like, believed was an imminent threat for a while
> 
> (also can I tell u a secret I was obsessed w modern Irish poetry in college and really all I want in the world is to write like 700k about Niall Lynch growing up as a dreamer in Ireland during the Troubles. but even I know that's self-indulgent (and that's coming from the girl writing a fleabag au as a thinly-veiled exploration of her own relationship w Catholicism sooooo))
> 
> anyway sorry im talking so much truth is im VERY SCARED to post this chapter bc it means like. a lot to me. so plz let me know what you think! a fave line maybe? idk I feel very raw abt this one guys!! 
> 
> also im on [tumblr](https://charactershoesfic.tumblr.com)


	6. vi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the morning after and the day before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the very long wait! for some reason I was convinced that this chapter HAD to be 8k long or else I had no artistic integrity etc. and then today I decided that was insane. anyway chapter count is going from 8 to 9, and hopefully we're gonna get back to a regular bi-weekly schedule 
> 
> tw for mention of self harm scars and past suicidal thoughts, nothing at all graphic. that's about it, this chapter's pretty chill

Improbably, morning comes. Ronan wakes early, presses out into the gray morning. He is tired and grim with the knowledge that he is, once again, Fighting With Gansey—and still. And still there is painful joy in crossing the yellowing fields, in throwing his shoulder against the stubborn barn door, in breathing the warm musk of livestock. 

The only time he didn’t live here, he told Adam’s half-lit face at bonfire, it almost killed him.

Last night, pinned between headlights, he let Gansey seize him by the wrists, turn up the old scars to the light. Now, Ronan washes his cold hands in the mudroom slop sink, considers the discolored skin beneath his wrists—as much a part of him as his knobby knuckles, as the strange jut of the thumb he slammed in a car door as a kid. 

“I wouldn’t do that shit,” Ronan, baffled, told Gansey’s silent fury on the drive home. “You know I’m not-”

Gansey said, “I can’t have this conversation right now. I won’t.” And then, like he couldn’t help it, “You’re wearing the bracelets again.”

The sink water finally runs warm, then too hot. Ronan rubs his hands against his jeans, considers the old leather wristbands—gnawed soft, cratered with six years of clenched jaws. He wore them for years to hide the scars, to stop from gnawing himself to the bone—and then he stopped. Healed. Whatever. 

He still wears the bands sometimes as a reminder—that he can stop. Heal. Whatever. He’s worked so hard to get better. And still, Declan will see him as the boy from the story, living among dead things. Gansey will see him as the boy on the church pew, half-clawed to death. 

He shoulders out of the mudroom into the morning half-light of the kitchen. At the head of the oversized kitchen table, Ashley startles. 

“Shit,” she says, after a very long second where each regards the other with alarm, “You made me spill my tea.”

Ronan swipes a tea towel off the rack, scrubs his hands dry, slings it at Ashley. She makes a face, but mops up the tea. Her face is covered in some green shit. In the yellowing light of morning, her hair’s as bright as Ronan’s mother’s.

He says, “It’s, like, early.”

“You have an actual rooster,” she tells him. “It’s not charming.”

The refrigerator is, bafflingly, full of plastic containers of flowers. Ronan has to dig through about fifteen individually-packaged slices of cake to get to the orange juice. Ashley makes a face of distaste as he drinks from the container.

“The frighteningly green cake,” she says eventually, filling the kettle in the sink, “kinda slaps. Pistachio something. Espresso, maybe. Too garish for the wedding, obviously, but we brought home leftovers from the cake-tasting.”

It’s almost a nice gesture. Ronan is troubled. He returns the orange juice, investigates the green cake, decides it’s too grotesque for him to resist. Gets a fork and then feels weird about it, turns to Ashley, holds up a second fork. 

“Oh, my god, no,” she says, her expression of horror somewhat limited by the green shit on her face. “I’m getting married tomorrow. I’m on, like, 24-7 Pediasure lockdown.”

Ronan shrugs, stabs a fork into the cake, lifts his chin in indication. “Looks like the shit on your face.”

“Femininity is an industrial complex,” she says. Then, “Fuck me, one bite. That bit with the icing- yeah. Don’t tell anyone.”

The kettle screams. Ashley goes to silence it. Ronan eats the cake; undeniably, it kinda slaps. 

“Does Declan know you’re alive?” she asks as she pours her tea. “As of last night, it was up for debate.”

“Gansey broke the bad news,” Ronan says. He goes back to the fridge, consulting the other slices of sample cake. “What’s this purple shit?”

“Lavender syrup. Kinda soapy. Have you considered that you and Matthew are Declan’s, like, only family?”

Ronan decides to take his chances with the soapy cake. He eats it in three graceless bites, hovering over the sink, and considers Ashley without expression. Swallows. 

“Thanks, I love to be reminded of my orphanhood.”

“I’m  _ just saying _ ,” Ashley says, and even the green shit on her face can’t suppress the enormity of her eyeroll, “maybe you could consider, like, shelving your problem with him until after his  _ actual wedding _ .”

There’s definitely a soapy aftertaste. Ronan tries not to let it register on his face. He stares at Ashley some more. 

“I don’t have a problem with Declan. Declan has a problem with  _ me _ .”

“Oh my god, like  _ three minutes  _ of emotional vulnerability.” Ashley makes an impatient gesture with her teabag, like maybe she’s thinking about drowning somebody. “I’m asking for, like, bare minimum. Five ‘I feel’ statements each.”

“Declan doesn’t have feelings,” Ronan tells her. “It’s just electric impulses. Sorry you had to find out like this.”

“Okay,” says Ashley, and abandons her tea to root around in the fridge. “I know I probably deserve this, like, karmically for engaging in the antiquated tradition of marriage and, like, with an Irish-Catholic  _ man  _ of all people. But I just  _ will not  _ do the emotional work in this relationship.” 

She emerges from the fridge with another two slices of cake. 

“I wanted to do, like, a chic little courthouse wedding but this stuff is important to Declan, so. Roosters and repression! I’m going to take a bath.”

She marches out of the kitchen. Ronan has to gulp her abandoned tea to chase the taste of flowery soap from his mouth. 

…

He goes and wakes Matthew up, bullies him into driving Ronan back to St. Agnes where he abandoned the BMW last night. There is faint organ music—the daily 7am mass singing dutiful  _ Our Father _ s. Ronan’s eyes find the seminarian’s shitbox car parked in the back lot, but the little attic window is dim and Matthew is hanging out the window of his douchey muscle car, asking  _ race you home _ ?

“No,” Ronan says, “I gotta visit Noah first.”

Matthew holds no grudges, will not ask about what happened last night, will not press Ronan for apologies or explanations. He turns his music up as loud as it will go—no matter that he’s parked beside a church, no matter that he’s playing some mellow Jim Croce—and does an embarrassing shoulder dance, points a finger at Ronan in dedication. 

“There’s cake in the fridge,” Ronan says, because that’s easier than  _ thank you  _ or  _ sorry for last night  _ or  _ why’s it so much easier for you _ . “Sample shit. It’s really fucking good. Try the green kind.”

“Fuck yeah,” says Matthew. “Love you.”

He’s whipping out of the parking lot then, not a turn signal in sight. Ronan’s eyes go to the attic window, but he won’t stop. He gets into the BMW. Goes to see Noah in the quiet corner of the graveyard where Ronan used to try to get Noah to smoke. Noah always said no; he was coward enough without the influences of marijuana-induced paranoia. 

Now, Ronan’s sort of glad Noah never gave in. If Noah’s gotta spend the rest of his existence in a graveyard, Ronan’s glad for every second he got outside of it—sitting beneath the pool table at Monmouth Manufacturing, watching anime, eating dry mouthfuls of cereal because Gansey was running low on empty cereal boxes and still had half the Aglionby athletic complex to build. 

The cemetery grass is going yellow with age. There’s a drowsy hum of a far-off lawnmower, of a nearby bumblebee. Gansey is already sitting with his back against Noah’s grave, and Ronan is not surprised to see him. 

He says, “Hi,” and goes to sit on the opposite side of the grave, letting his shoulders press against the cool stone. 

For a very long time there is quiet. They did this when Noah was alive, too—put him between them, let him buffer their angry silences—and that fills Ronan with some strange combination of satisfaction and sadness, of things staying the same. 

Gansey says eventually, “You really come here every week?”

Ronan ensures he’s hidden from Gansey’s view by the headstone, then lifts his wrist to bite at one of his leather bands. That feeling again—things staying the same. 

“I got Declan worrying I’m one of those hoarders who won’t leave the house. With, like, dead cats under the bed. Then I got you worrying because I  _ do  _ leave the house.”

“Terribly inconvenient of us,” Gansey says stiffly, “to care about you.”

Ronan wants to shove his fists into Gansey’s face—not to strike, but to show him the unsplit skin of knuckles, to say  _ see?  _ Last night these knuckles brushed the brittle line of Adam Parrish’s windpipe, the soft skin beneath his eye. He wants to tell him about the tree struck by lightning, flowering again. 

But like every strong emotion Ronan’s ever felt, it comes out choked and furious. “What do you want me to say, Gansey? You want me to say I’m fucking happy?”

“I- Of course,” Gansey’s voice says, stunned and young. 

Once, seventeen, marching through a Henrietta junkyard in pursuit of one of the leylines scrawled across every scrap of Gansey’s homework, Gansey had stopped still and said  _ Ronan _ ? and when Ronan turned back, he was standing very still with one hand half-raised, as if to fend off a blow. That’s what Gansey’s voice sounds like, just for a moment.  _ Ronan?  _

“Of  _ course _ I want you to say you’re happy.”

They had stood together in the junkyard for minutes, sun beating down, watching the bee crawl sleepily over the lines of Gansey’s palm. And then Ronan’s hand came out, fast, and he had the bee between his own hands and in another breath he’d crushed it flat. 

“You don’t believe me, though.”

“I do,” Gansey says, and his voice is warm with it. Believing was never Gansey’s problem. “You don’t want to say it, though. You don’t want to say you’re happy.”

Down the line of graves, the Weekly Mourner settles in front of a new grave. Lowers himself to the ground. Commences weeping. Ronan watches the strange shapes of his back, wracked in a grief so great it is nearly a transformation—at any moment, the Weekly Mourner might tear through his clothes like a werewolf. 

He says, “I’m scared of it.”

Gansey’s voice, careful. “Being happy?”

“Things,” Ronan says. “People. Forgetting people.”

“Oh, Ronan,” says Gansey, sorrowful. Then, “I’m coming around.”

He crawls around the gravestone so he can sit next to Ronan. He gets grass stains on both knees, which is how Ronan knows Gansey loves him. Together, they watch the mourning man cry.

“Don’t say some shit how Noah would want me to move on,” Ronan says eventually. “You know he wouldn’t. Dude took things  _ personal _ .”

Gansey laughs, agrees, “He would sulk.”

Overhead, a wheeling bird. Several graves down, a plastic pinwheel rattles through its rotation. Ronan closes his eyes against the sun, allows himself to feel warm. 

“I know it’s not the same for me,” Gansey’s voice falters. “With your parents, I mean. But I miss him, too.”

“You’re better at it,” Ronan says. “You do it better.”

Quiet. “I don’t think I do. I hope I don’t.”

“I just mean,” says Ronan, not knowing what he means. “It’s like- Where do I put it all? It has to go somewhere. All the fuckin- loving them.“

“I’ll take it,” Gansey says in his easy way, making things So with just a word. “Give it to me.”

In the junkyard, seventeen, Ronan killed a bee between his bare hands and afterwards Gansey had sorrowfully considered the stinger lodged in the meat of Ronan’s palm.  _ It wouldn’t have stung me. It’s just dying and doesn’t understand _ . But his breathing stabilized and they both knew that he was grateful to have Ronan there to do the killing. 

Ronan says, “Don’t be greedy.” Which is how Gansey knows Ronan loves him. 

They walk back the long way, looping around to pass the carved-up willow tree that Ronan loves and the hunched plot of gravestones, so weathered as to be illegible, that Gansey says excitedly are probably pre-Civil War. 

They pass the carved Celtic cross that marks the Lynch family plot, but they don’t stop. Ronan doesn’t make those visits with company. Gansey lowers his chin respectfully, even so. Ronan loves him like a fist around his heart—for his  _ rightness _ . It’s one of those big and ferocious feelings that can’t fit inside of Ronan’s body; he has to tear a leaf off a hanging tree, tear it to bits between his fingers. 

Gansey says, “Do you want to stop? I can wait.”

Ronan shakes his head, knocks his shoulder with Gansey’s. He thinks that one day—like Noah—he’ll be glad for every minute he didn’t spend in a cemetery plot. 

He says, “You know I wouldn’t- I don’t even think about it anymore.”

It’s a non sequitur, but also not really. Gansey doesn’t pretend to misunderstand. He reaches out and touches Ronan on the wrist, because Gansey has always dealt with big and ferocious feelings more gracefully than Ronan. He says only, “I’m glad.”

Back to the BMW and Gansey’s objectionable rental car, then. 

Back to the Barns, teeming with catering trucks and bridesmaids and three quarters of an Irish string quartet. 

Back to Declan, who is simultaneously being fitted for his tuxedo and engaging in a slightly hysterical argument with a visibly-stoned guy in a denim vest. 

“You!” he says, thrusts a finger at Ronan as he steps into the kitchen. There is a flutter of hushed objections from the tailors trying to hem his cuffs. “Come here and intervene.”

Ronan comes there and intervenes, although he stops first to retrieve a slice of cake from the refrigerator. Gansey gets a look at the stress lines by Declan’s mouth and starts brewing a great kettle of herbal tea. 

“How many fittings have you  _ had,  _ man?”

“My proportions,” Declan says tightly, “keep changing.”

“He’s shrinking,” Ashley yells from the next room, where she and Helen have rolled back the rug and laid out a fleet of place-cards like some kind of war council meeting. “Nearly three-quarters of an inch.”

“It’s stress.  _ This _ man,” says Declan, lifting his chin to Stoned Denim Vest Man with a level of disgust usually reserved only for Ronan, “is telling me that, despite the very generous down payment he’s already received, he  _ won’t _ release doves at the ceremony tomorrow.”

Ronan’s not sure how this is his problem, but also he’s not  _ un _ invested. He turns to consider Stoned Denim Vest Man with his best  _ snake on a hot rock  _ gaze. 

“Won’t do it,” Stoned Denim Vest Man says unapologetically. “Already lost two this morning. You boys got yourselves a real cat problem. You know how damaging outdoor cats are to the natural biosphere?”

Gansey starts to laugh and converts it into an unconvincing cough. The tailors make some unhappy noises as Declan begins to shake with fury a little bit. 

“They’re _barn_ _cats. _This is a _farm_.”

“Natural selection,” Helen yells. “Tell him about natural selection.”

“Natural selection,” Ronan says, not quite knowing what it means but feeling it sounds impressive. “Can’t fuck with the natural order, man.” 

Stoned Denim Vest Man gives him a withering look. “Doesn’t apply to  _ invasive species _ . I’m not letting my birds out into a massacre.”

The kettle wails. Gansey mumbles something that might be  _ oh thank God.  _ Ronan finishes his slice of cake, levels Stoned Denim Vest Man with his best glare. But it’s to no avail. This man is serious about his birds. 

“I’ll blackball you,” Helen threatens, a furious island among a sea of place-cards. “You don’t know the clout I have in the Virginia Events and Occasions game. Your doves will never work another day in their lives.”

“Won’t do it.” Stoned Denim Vest Man crosses his arms. He’s got a tattoo of a dove on his bicep. Ronan feels suddenly certain they’re fighting a futile battle. 

“Okay,” he says, “we’ll round up the fucking cats. We’ll lock ‘em in one of the barns. Guaranteed no-cat zone for the next forty-eight hours. How’s that?”

“And,” Gansey tactfully presses a mug of herbal tea into Declan’s hand, “we’ll of course pay for the two birds who’ve already- tragically lost their lives.”

This is how Gansey, Ronan, and Matthew find themselves chasing cats all afternoon, climbing into the haylofts and stalking the sunny patches on the porch. Gansey—Finder of Things, for whom the world turns out its pockets—has a talent for tracking them down. Matthew—a sunny creature himself—has an uncanny knack for quieting the cats, clicking at them strangely as they go willingly into his arms. Ronan has no such talents. By evening, his forearms are clawed and his neck is sore with stooping. 

“All I’m saying,” Helen is saying as she climbs out of Gansey’s rental into the St. Agnes lot, “is somebody better do a bird-count before the ceremony starts. I wouldn’t be surprised if that crook tries to make some money off us.  _ Oh, I had fifty birds and now there’s only forty-eight.  _ I’d like to see him  _ try _ to take us to small-claims.”

“Is the Occasional Doves industry,” Gansey ventures mildly, “especially litigious?”

“Don’t start with me, Dick. Matthew, Ronan, fix your ties or I’ll do them myself. Honestly, you’d never know you were  _ prep school _ alumni.”

Ronan slams the BMW door, doesn’t point out that technically he did not graduate prep school, but only because he thinks resurrecting  _ that  _ particular argument will send Declan into an irreversible fury. He’s already looking half-martyred as he climbs out of his Volvo, mumbling into his cellphone about floral arrangements. Ashley is tenderly picking lint from the collar of his impeccable blazer, like she too senses that so much as a fleck of dust might send her fiancee off the edge. 

“I’ll be right in,” Declan says, lifting the phone from his ear. “I’ve just got to finish- Ashley, the optics of  _ spouse  _ versus  _ wife _ \- If you could just shoot Barclay a quick email before they approve any press statements-“

“Okay,  _ spouse _ ,” Ashley says, sweetly wresting the phone from Declan. “We have a wedding to rehearse. He’ll call you back. Bye-bye.”

Gansey is fixing Matthew’s tie and Helen is herding bridesmaids into the church. Ashley’s parents—an upright, WASPy looking pair—look appropriately mystified by the whole ordeal. Ronan fights absent-mindedly with his tie, watches his brother assemble himself into Declan Lynch like a puppet coming to life, a twitchy reanimation. 

Here is how it happens: his shoulders make a straight line and his chin ducks down, then lifts. His mouth makes a straight line. His arms shake out at the elbow like he’s coming unfolded or being electrocuted, and then he is Declan Lynch again. 

…

This is a story of the Lynch brothers. Like most good stories, it features murder and intrigue and orphans. Niall Lynch’s funeral ended with a fist fight—a fitting send-off for their fisticuffs father. Aurora Lynch’s funeral was a subdued second act; she’d been in hospice care for months, her sons banished to the Aglionby dorms. 

Here are the Lynch brothers in the doorway of St. Agnes, receiving a hundred condoling handshakes. A dark head, a shaved head, a blonde head—bowed to some unspeakable grief. 

“It was a broken heart, it was,” an old woman told the eldest Lynch brother wisely, clasping his hands at the wake. “She didn’t want to live without Niall, bless him.”

“It was early-onset dementia, actually,” Declan said. Clasped hands. Smiled. “Thanks so much for coming.”

“The hard part’s still to come,” she told the middle Lynch brother sympathetically. She tried to clasp his hands. He shoved them childishly into his pockets, flinched back. “People stop calling. Start forgetting.”

The middle Lynch brother wasn’t speaking—hadn’t been since he got the call. He only leveled the old woman with a shark’s stare. Something about his flat cool eyes made her step away, hand fumbling for the dish of holy water. 

Nobody tried to speak to the youngest Lynch brother. He was crying openly and without shame, and the effect—golden hair, dewy blue eyes—was somewhat breathtaking. They squeezed his hands. They knocked their knuckles briefly against the closed casket. They proceeded up the aisle. 

Afterwards, they received guests at the Barns. It was the first time the Lynch brothers had been back for more than an afternoon visit since their father’s death. All the rooms were filled with flowers, so Ronan couldn’t smell the familiar  _ home  _ smells that he missed so wrenchingly. Declan had thankfully paid someone to remove the hospital bed from the living room. 

Ronan, navigating through a curious and blank sort of grief, had climbed the stairs and gone to sit in his empty childhood bedroom. Declan was already there with his face tilted up to the ceiling, considering a hanging mobile of strangely-carved wood. 

Ronan flung himself down on the bed, put his face into the pillow, considered the white and howling emptiness that would not allow him to cry. 

Declan said eventually, “Drink some of this, will you? I can’t get too drunk.”

And Ronan rolled over and took the glass of scotch from Declan, and for a moment it was like he was small and sick in bed and taking slow sips of ginger ale while his mother held the back of his skull, as if she could ease even the smallest burden of his head upon his neck. 

“You can’t get drunk either,” Declan said eventually, but he let Ronan drain it. Watched him wince with some satisfaction. “It’s meant for sipping.”

Ronan considered the ceiling, crossed his hands over his chest and considered corpsehood. Considered his brother’s shoulders—briefly bowing to grief, and then reassembling into a straight line. 

“We should get back down there,” Declan said, dug his knuckles hard into his eye sockets. His eyebrows pressed a pained line into his forehead that made Ronan think of their father, of their mother bending to smooth away the line with her fingers. “Buck up. Smile. Charm.” 

Ronan registered anger, very distantly. He swept out a hand, feebly crashed some books and an old-fashioned alarm clock off the bedside table. 

“Really, Ronan,” Declan said, but it was as half-hearted as Ronan’s anger. 

“It’s so fucking easy for you,” Ronan said blankly to the ceiling. His first words in three days. “Fucking-  _ buck up _ .” 

And secretly he was grateful for Declan’s familiar insincerity, because it gave direction to his blank and white fury. And probably Declan was grateful for Ronan’s relentless predictable terrors, too. It was normalcy, almost. 

“None of this is easy,” Declan said grimly. Put up a hand and set the strange wooden mobile swinging. “We’ll be okay.”

And they descended to the well-wishers and their father’s black-clad business associates, one of whom had probably put out the hit that killed him. Probably that thought should’ve set Ronan flaming, but he couldn’t summon any fury. Instead he’d found more of the awful Scotch and gone out to the back porch and sat there, losing time, until sudden Noah was there to hold his hand and Gansey was there to say kind and ineffective things like  _ you’re doing so good  _ and  _ Ronan, god, Ronan.  _

…

Here are the Lynch brothers again in the doorway of St. Agnes. Declan gives Ronan a sharp look and says, “What?” 

And Ronan says, “Nothing.” 

They step into the church.

A brief and hushed rehearsal. The shitty old monsignor mumbles, directing people with his pocked old hands—first reading, second reading. Now time for the vows. Ashley gamely plays along, smiling tolerantly like she’s been pulled out of the audience to play assistant to some cruise-ship magician. Declan looks like he’s recently undergone dental surgery and is trying to be pleasant about it. 

Ronan says “Amen” when he’s meant to, kneels when he’s meant to, slides a finger over the little metal plate on the side of the pew that reads  _ dedicated in the name of Niall and Aurora Lynch _ . Matthew’s big, solid hand finds his. Gets Ronan’s thumb into a ferocious grip. “Thumb war me. One, two, three.”

Adam is an intermittent presence in the church, ducking in with an elaborately scrolled book for Pastor Sandi, disappearing into the sacristy with armfuls of clean white linen. His remote and careful eyes catch deliberately on Ronan and Ronan holds up a hand, bares his palm to him—no sigils burned there. Adam’s smile is a brief and miraculous thing. 

“Bum-bum-ba-bum,” Matthew sings under his breath as they follow Declan and Ashley out of the church. He is evidently having a great time, unbothered by the fearsome glare he received when the priest said awkwardly  _ now is when you’d kiss _ and Matthew had whistled through his teeth. “Bum- _ bum _ -ba- _ bum _ .”

There are a couple more cars in the parking lot now, people straggling into the church for evening Adoration, heads bowed to the plain white host in its monstrance, an elaborately carved golden sunburst. Ronan moves among them to light a candle under the glass window that makes him miss his mother. He considers the snake caught beneath her bare heel. Thinks,  _ fuck it.  _ Ducks behind the altar to find Adam. 

Adam’s in the little sacristy chamber, still in his plain white cassock, unwinding his hands from a strip of white cloth—worn to prevent unholy hands from touching the monstrance. He gives Ronan the same brief smile; his face and wrists are dust-colored against the clean white of his robe. 

“Got a backstage pass?”

“I’m friends with the bouncer,” Ronan says, and moves closer because he can’t help himself. He starts to reach for Adam’s hands—boyish knuckles, faintly freckled—and stops. “St. Peter. Is that funny?”

“No,” Adam says. He doesn’t smile, but the sides of his mouth press into parenthetical creases. He knocks his hand briefly against Ronan’s, more knuckle and lingering wrist than a traditional fistbump. 

“There’s gonna be a rehearsal dinner. Fucking awful. You should come.”

“Compelling,” Adam says. 

He moves away to take off the white cassock, revealing a white cotton shirt, the collar soft and stretched around his beautiful neck. Ronan stares, doesn’t hide it. Last night, Adam stopped halfway up the attic stairs and turned—one step above Ronan—to kiss him, like the top of the stairs was too far away to wait. 

Ronan says, “Sorry for last night.” 

He watches Adam’s busy hands—folding away the cassock, the cincture, the cloth he’d used to hold the monstrance—and feels some strange twist of emotion. It’s like the feeling he gets when Gansey says just the right thing, just what he should. There is a _rightness _to Adam’s ministrations, the casual ceremony of it all. 

Adam says, careful, “Which part?”

“Leaving like that,” he says, because he won’t lie. “Not the rest.”

Adam’s hands still briefly, just for a second, and then resume their work. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

He turns away from the cabinet of linens and his hand comes up to his mouth, boyish and young, and then he’s very slowly and carefully pressing Ronan back against the bookshelf full of theological encyclopedias and faded yellow catechism, hand seeking wrist. 

He says, “Can I-“

And Ronan’s already saying, “Yeah. Yeah. Anything.”

It’s a characteristically careful kiss, certain and deliberate as Adam. One hand at Ronan’s wrist. The sweet and sharp smell of Adam, cheap shampoo and chrism. The strange and unshuttered second where Ronan’s eyes are open and Adam’s aren’t—mouth knocked open, eyes screwed tight in not quite believing—both thrilling and sorrowing. 

The next kiss not so slow, then, Ronan’s head knocking back against the bookshelf and Adam laughing, saying, “Sorry.”

“I don’t care. I don’t care.” Ronan is laughing, too, willing clay under Adam’s hands—a rapturous saint on a pyre, the most content piece of kindling to ever burn. He gets his mouth on Adam’s beautiful neck, binds his unholy hands in the hem of Adam’s white cotton t-shirt. “Anything you want.”

“C’mere.” Fingers on Ronan’s jaw, guiding his mouth back to Adam’s. Not so careful now, clumsier with wanting. 

Adam’s tongue in his mouth then, and sheafs of yellow catechism falling behind him like premature autumn. The church bells sound overhead, signaling some changing hour, and Adam falls back onto his heels. 

“You’re going,” he whispers, eyes closed and almost laughing, “to burn my life down.”

Ronan thinks with a sort of hysterical wonder that he could push the hair off Adam’s forehead if he wanted to. He could get his hands up under the white shirt. He could put his mouth to Adam’s corded wrist. He thinks,  _ careful _ . 

He says, “Come for dinner. I won’t let Helen Gansey talk to you.”

“I don’t want to talk to anyone,” Adam says, lets Ronan crowd him back against the linen cabinet, against the hanging robes—green, purple, scarlet, gold. “Also, there’s Adoration.”

“I won’t let anybody talk to you,” Ronan says agreeably. “No fucking talking. We’ll pet the sheep. Come for dinner.”

Adam’s face does something brief and complicated. He is strange and shabby against the deep purples, the elaborately scrolled vestments, the gold embroidery. It’s all garish beside the fine lines of his browned face. 

“Okay,” he says. “Later. After Adoration.”

“Okay,” says Ronan, lets himself grin. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> anyway that b99 scene where captain holt loses his shit about dentists/doctorates, except it's me yelling about outdoor cats being a danger to indigenous wildlife
> 
> I think that's it. Thank u so much for reading and for the response to last chapter which made me SO HAPPY!! I love when y'all leave fave lines or when you pull out the secret bits of fleabag lurking within each chapter lmfao. anyway come chat w me on [tumblr](https://charactershoesfic.tumblr.com) if u want!! bye!


	7. vii

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> two encounters in a grocery store. or, adam parrish makes things hard on himself

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi hello here ya go! 
> 
> tw for allusions to past child abuse, some self-loathing kinda victim-blamey thoughts from Adam about his own abuse. that should be all!

Adam’s shitbox car takes the curving road to the Barns slowly. He parks beneath a plum tree, pendulous with the last fruit of summer, and then thinks better of it. He should move the car so it won’t be splattered with fallen fruit when he returns, because he is low on wiper fluid and doesn’t have the money to clean his car right now. But he doesn’t. Some contradictory nature has gotten a grip on him.

Gansey is ducking out of a small mudroom with his arms full of bottles of wine. For a second, Adam envies him for the easy way he navigates this place. And then Gansey’s face goes bright with greeting, and Adam feels sorry for the envy—for the ugly part of him that can’t stop _wanting_.

“Adam Parrish!” Gansey says, and gravely holds out a fist for Adam to bump, a bottle of wine to hold. “Just the man I wanted to see.”

There’s so much easy power to his words that Adam thinks, perhaps. Perhaps he is only here because Gansey thought he’d like to see him, and so it was so. Perhaps this whole glorious night has assembled itself around them—fragrant trees and purpling sky—simply because Gansey thought it ought to be.

He says, “I was thinking of you.”

Gansey is pleased. “Were you?”

They set off across the grass, along a newly laid stone path. Even Adam, interloper, can identify the new additions, the traces of outside influence—hung lanterns, pruned hedges, weeping willows reduced to a moderate cry—among the worn, comfortable shabbiness of the Barns.

“There’s a Quaker Meeting next week,” Adam says. “I don’t know if you’ve been. I think you’d find it interesting.”

_I think you’d find it interesting_, offered as careful and casual as he can muster. Like rolling up the sleeves of his Aglionby uniform to disguise the fraying cuffs. Under Gansey’s eyes, Adam has to stop his hands from brushing at his clothes, shaking loose a cloud of imagined trailer park dust.

“A Quaker Meeting?”

Adam does not allow his hands to twitch. “The whole congregation sits in silence, unless the spirit moves them to speak aloud. It’s surprisingly democratic.”

“Adam Parrish,” says Gansey in a way that is wonderful and wondering.

Last night in the dim church, Ronan said _I wish I’d _and Adam had understood, had allowed himself to imagine it, too. A world in which Adam might have knocked shoulders with Ronan, watched Gansey part crowds with a word. A world in which Gansey might ask _Adam? _and Adam would have the answer, whatever the question.

There is a loathsome, cringing part of Adam that still remembers being seven, sitting in the open mouth of the garage and watching the sprawl of his father’s legs as he worked beneath a truck—the straight shins, the crooked knees—and saying _Dad, did you know the moon controls the ocean _and _Dad, did you know there’s places where salt is more valuable than gold_ and _Dad, did you know my teacher says I read best in the whole class?_

That is not the loathsome part. The loathing comes in these moments, this strange and desperate belief that Adam might say just the right thing—just the thing to turn Gansey’s head, set him smiling. Just the thing to bend his father’s knees, to send him sliding out from under the truck to say admiringly, _No shit_?

“Next week’s no good,” Gansey says, mournful. “I’ve got to prep for syllabus week. It’s a wonder I’m here at all, really. But I’ll be back in November for Ronan’s birthday. And you’ll have to come and visit the archives with me some time. I’ll provide all the dust allergy medication money can buy.”

And Adam says how that sounds nice. And Gansey says how he really means it, he’s got a remarkably comfortable futon, and there’s plenty of research assistantship grants available that he’s never taken advantage of. And that’s nice, too—because Gansey probably does mean it, even though Adam will never come.

For the moment, though, he lets himself pretend—imagines Gansey’s Georgetown rowhouse and the remarkably comfortable futon and days of dusty archival work in some basement room that is both shabby and beautiful. Imagines the Barns in November, smelling of damp. He can’t stop _wanting_.

Gansey says abruptly, “I’m sorry about last night, Adam. I realized afterwards that I acted very rudely."

Adam shakes his head. “I didn’t think so.”

It was a strange night. Nothing behaved as it should. Adam had seen the headlights of the BMW from his bedroom window and then instead of returning to his reading, he had gone down into the dark church.

“It was just a moment of confusion,” Gansey says elegantly. He must be well practiced in this habit—sweeping things under the rug without ever quite acknowledging the existence of a rug or a broom of any kind. Adam plays along obligingly.

“I liked your driver,” he says. “The Nino’s waitress, right?”

“I cannot express to you,” Gansey says, and his long-suffering tone is entirely contradicted by the fond twitch of his mouth, “how badly she drives.”

They slip into the barn, lit with a hundred tiny tea candles, as Declan Lynch stands to thank everyone for being here. There is some polite clapping. Ronan’s youngest brother whoops and taps a knife against his glass until it rings. Ronan is wrestling the knife away when Gansey and Adam sink into the seats on either side of him.

“You’ll smash it, moron,” Ronan mumbles, places the glass out of Matthew’s reach. “This is Mom’s good shit from when she got married.”

“You’re like an old spinster aunt,” Matthew says. He steals his knife back and uses it to spear a wedge of mozzarella off an appetizer plate. “With your fine china and your birds.”

“And cats,” Gansey says. He pours a glass of champagne, passes it down. “Start drinking, Adam.”

Ronan takes the glass, hands it to Adam. He’s lost the tie he wore in the chapel, lost his jacket, and there’s a sort of insouciant looseness to the way his knuckles knock Adam’s, the way his mouth moves sideways into a smile.

“Parrish,” he says.

“Lynch,” Adam says, nearly smiles back.

“How was Adoration?”

He spent most of it in the sacristy on his knees, collecting scattered pages of catechism—_As a deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God_—and considering his hands with a sort of bewildered wonder. It was like he had forgotten he could touch gently, with intention.

“Long,” he says.

Ronan’s mouth does something small and knowing. He’d let Adam usher him out the back of the church, lingered there when Adam didn’t immediately let go of his wrist. Said, strangely careful, _You don’t have to do anything you don’t want. You know that, right? I’m not asking for anything_.

It was an extraordinarily kind thing to say. Adam was wretched with it—that kindness, that question. _You know that, right_?

He nods his chin to Ronan’s glass of champagne. “Planning on fighting your brother?”

Ronan’s smile—fast and bright. “We like to get an early start on things.”

“He fights Declan sober, to be fair,” Gansey says. “It’s a fact of life. Death, taxes, et cetera. Adam, try the stuffed figs.”

Adam obliges; another trace of the trailer park on him—he eats when he can.

“Maybe you’ll fight me this time” Matthew says hopefully. “I wouldn’t win, but I feel like I could get in a few good hits. I took karate, didn’t I, Ronan?”

“You did not take karate.” Ronan’s smile for Matthew is an open and devastating thing. “You watched _Karate Kid _a lot.”

“I could get in a few good hits,” Matthew repeats, unbothered. Then he starts tapping his knife against Gansey’s wine glass in encouragement as a tall, crisp-looking man stands to speak.

He toasts to his daughter, Ashley, and to his future son-in-law. He toasts to the beautiful evening and their gracious host. Ronan’s teeth show in a shark-smile. He toasts to those who are no longer with them—a beloved grandmother, a favorite professor of Declan and Ashley’s, Aurora Lynch, Niall Lynch. Ronan’s teeth show like a piece of roadkill.

Gansey’s hand moves to the back of Ronan’s chair.

“To a long life together. Cheers!”

The room refrains, “Cheers!” Adam mouths the word without speaking it.

“If you fucking break that glass I’ll kill you,” Ronan tells Matthew, but that’s all that happens. Ashley’s father sits. The caterers come around with plates of miniature dessert. Gansey’s hand nudges briefly between Ronan’s shoulders.

“All joy?”

“All fucking joy,” Ronan says.

Adam eats what he is offered, drinks what Gansey thrusts at him, mostly sits quiet. He watches Declan and Ashley’s heads bow together—dark and light—and wonders if they are in love. He searches for some sign of it in the way they hold their wrists, in the way they close their eyes around a particularly good mouthful of food. He’s not sure if he believes in love, but he thinks if it could grow anywhere it would be here—here, in this yellow-lit barn, in this place out of time.

Ronan slides him a plate, a half-eaten slice of cake. “Try this green shit. Fucking slaps.”

Adam’s face must betray his enjoyment, because Ronan prods him with his fork like, _told you_. Adam allows himself to be prodded, watches the set of Ronan’s wrists. Lets his eyes close briefly against the taste of sugar and espresso—gritty and sweet.

“Okay, so small situation.” Helen Gansey is suddenly crouching between their chairs, balancing on impossibly high heels, smelling of cigarettes. Her eyes glance up to the head of the table, then back to Ronan and her brother. “Felis catus has been spotted. I repeat, a _cat _has been spotted by the driveway.”

“Were you smoking?” Gansey sniffs suspiciously.

“We all have our vices, _Dick_. I need you to deal with the cat and I need you to do it _without _alerting Declan, because that man is about to burst an ulcer, and I will _not _pay funereal rites for some fucking white-washed pigeon.”

Matthew silently hands her a fresh glass of champagne. She blows him a distracted kiss.

“I’ll handle it,” Ronan says, standing.

“Discretion,” Helen says again sternly, and then she’s whisking away to argue with the caterer over the raspberries, which she suspects may be frozen and not freshly picked—_I’m not a rube, the difference_ _in textures is astronomical._

“When you say _handle it_,” Adam says, following Ronan and Gansey out of the barn, into the night. “You don’t mean-“

“We’re not fucking killing cats, Parrish.”

Ronan is disgusted, because of course Ronan Lynch would never hurt a cat. It makes Adam laugh to think he knows this about Ronan. To think he is walking among these Raven Boys, these boys whose names he learned to say, even in his brief time at Aglionby, with a trace of reverence. Richard Campbell Gansey, who was to be envied but not hated—he was too decent—and Ronan Lynch, who was to be feared.

Ronan Lynch, who couldn’t hurt a cat. Ronan Lynch, not asking for anything.

“We’re corralling them in the woodshed,” Gansey says. “It’s very allegoric. Herding cats.”

He explains about the doves as they cross the lawn, generously lets Ronan interject with a cruel imitation of the very stoned dove-keeper. Adam thinks that Gansey is a wonderful talker—not because he is powerful, but because he is generous. He lets Ronan tell all the funniest bits, grins wide when Adam laughs.

“I imagine in the spring you’ll have quite a few kittens, Ronan.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Ronan says. He moves among the plum trees, careful and easy as a cat himself. “You think my cats are fucking?”

“Like all the people born nine months after the moon landing,” Adam says. Moving in the dim, he is startled by the sudden press of fruit to his cheek. A yellow plum, pale as a planet. “A baby boom.”

“There’s something rather wonderful about that,” says Gansey, and it _is _wonderful once Gansey says so.

“There you are, you little fucking nightmare,” Ronan’s voice says, softer than expected. Softer than Adam would’ve thought him capable, back in Aglionby. He drops to his knees among the dim, shadowed trees and makes a soft _pssst _of tongue between teeth. “Come join the barnyard orgy.”

“I’ve got a blazer on,” Gansey says nobly. “Better let me hold her so she doesn’t claw your arms to bits.”

“Don’t be a martyr,” Ronan says. “Also, too late.”

Another _pssst _and then Ronan’s straightening with an indignant cat in his arms. His teeth are very white in the dark. Adam feels briefly as flimsy as a plum, like if you pressed a thumbnail to the skin beneath his wrist, it would weep sweet juice. And then he is only Adam again, stepping out from among the trees.

They deposit the cat in a shed where about seven or eight tawny cats without breed or pedigree rub inquiringly between ankles.

“Maybe,” Gansey says thoughtfully, “you _are _a spinster aunt, Ronan.”

“They’re fucking barn cats, not pets,” Ronan says, and crouches to let one of the cats headbutt his palm lovingly. “Ruthless killers. Fucking dove mercenaries.”

A cat threads between Adam’s feet. Perhaps it recognizes him as a fellow mutt. He holds himself carefully still, to avoid treading on a stray paw. When he glances at Ronan, Ronan’s looking back at him.

“You should count the doves before the ceremony,” Adam says, “so he can’t scam you.”

Gansey laughs, perches on an old bin. “My sister said the same thing.”

“You got a suspicious mind, Parrish,” Ronan says, and he grins a knife-grin at him. “Real unattractive quality in a priest.”

Adam feels strange and tilting and unlike himself. He grins back. “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves.”

“Asshole,” says Ronan Lynch, wolf in their midst. “What kinda Sunday school homeschool-ass weirdo goes around quoting the Bible at people all day?”

“Real attractive quality in a priest,” Gansey says innocently. Then, to Adam, “Ronan was homeschooled. He was practically feral when he started at Aglionby.”

“Yeah they civilized me right up,” Ronan says, laying back on his elbows on the dusty floor and allowing a cat to walk across his chest.

They sit there amid the milling cats for a while. Adam joins Gansey on the grain bin, tucks up his legs and rests his chin on his knees, feeling tired in a well-worn and comforting way, as opposed to the usual heavy exhaustion. A cat settles between them to clean itself.

“I guess they’re really gonna get married,” Ronan says.

“You thought they wouldn’t?”

“I don’t know,” Ronan says. He’s found a length of yellow twine and is twitching it at a supremely disinterested black cat. “It’s Declan.”

Adam doesn’t know what this means, but it means something to Gansey, who nods thoughtfully and puts his thumb to his mouth in a way that is both boyish and elderly.

“I’m trying to persuade Adam,” he says eventually, “to come visit. I’ve got so much room in the Georgetown apartment. I’m always trying to make you stay with me, Ronan, aren’t I?”

The Georgetown apartment. It’s like a snatch of every conversation Adam overheard in his time at Aglionby. It wasn’t so hard to talk like a Raven Boy in their language of casual allusions—surnames and exotic destinations. They called their fathers by first names and their vacation homes by The House. _Come back to The House, won’t you_? _Party at the Cape House this weekend._ Adam could have aped their words well enough, but his cadence would always be wrong. He was not a native speaker.

Back then, this kind of talk would have infuriated him—because he wanted it so badly. It’s easier now that Adam’s given up on all that. Wanting.

“Fuck off, Gansey,” Ronan says easily. “I’m not gonna come to fucking Georgetown.”

“Yes, you’ve made that abundantly clear,” Gansey says, a little stiff. “I was inviting Adam. What will you do after I’m gone, then?”

Ronan’s face is turned away, focused on the cats. “The same shit I’ve _been _doing.”

“Which would be what, exactly?”

“Henrietta doesn’t just freeze when you leave, Gansey. We do okay without you here to tell the leaves to fucking change-“

Like everything else at the Barns, this argument is well-worn. Adam watches them like actors in a play, rehearsing a conflict he has no part in. Everything about this night is bright and slightly unreal, a strange and dreamy interlude before Adam returns to his real life.

“Adam,” Gansey appeals to him eventually, and he is startled to be addressed.

“I don’t know,” he says, lifts a shoulder. “If I lived in a place like this, I wouldn’t want to leave either.”

It’s an easy answer, but Ronan looks at him in a strange and glowing and grateful way—not a smile, but eyes hot with something. It gives Adam a giddy reckless thrill, to think he could say something to make Ronan Lynch look at him like that. Like a wanted thing. Like something worthy of notice.

He thinks, _I did that. That was me. _The strange feeling of fingers against a light socket, but this time it’s not God— it’s Adam.

…

Gansey goes on ahead to give Helen the all-clear on The Cat Situation. Ronan and Adam take a detour for the house to retrieve a sweatshirt for Adam. Summer nights don’t hold their heat like they used to, and soon it will be entirely autumn. They step through a backdoor into a farmhouse kitchen, disordered and homey. Adam takes it all in—the broad table, the fussy old-fashioned lace curtains, the dented teakettle, the jumble of shoes by the door, the almost silent slink of a cat in the dim next room—and knows that all the while he looks, Ronan is looking at him.

Turning, he says, “I like it here.”

Ronan’s eyes take on that hot glow again—pride and gratitude, all at once—and Adam thinks, _careful_. He isn’t used to having power. He doesn’t trust himself with it.

Up a steep staircase to a hushed second floor. They walk close to each other without talking. The staircase is too narrow to walk shoulder-to-shoulder, so he walks behind Ronan and lets himself look without being observed—the handsome shape of his skull, the spiny tattoo peering above the collar of his shirt.

After last night in the church, after Ronan had left with Gansey, the coldest and most cynical bit of Adam had started to wonder—had whispered, _you only want to be wanted_, _you only want to imagine you could have his life for a while_. He wasn’t sure he was capable of anything more than that. It’s both a relief and a terror to be proven wrong—to _want _a person like this.

“This one’s mine,” Ronan says, ducking into a room and flicking on a light. It’s a careless gesture, but Adam feels again that he’s being shown something important.

The room is less crowded than the rest of the house, as though it’s been decluttered by less sentimental hands, but there are still whimsical remnants of a childhood bedroom—artifacts of some younger Ronan. A hanging mobile of strangely carved wood, a few brightly-colored toy cars lined up on the windowsill, a battered license plate and a sheaf of speeding tickets hung on the inside of his door. An old skateboard tucked beneath the desk. The unmade, torn-up bed of a restless sleeper.

He feels that same surge of complicated wanting.

“Gansey’s not bullshitting,” Ronan says abruptly, fumbling in the closet, “about asking you to visit. I know he talks like a Gansey, but he doesn’t do false gestures.”

“You won’t go stay with him, though,” Adam says, which is easier than saying that _he _won’t either.

“No,” Ronan says, emerging from the closet and tossing a sweatshirt at him. “I don’t like it there. I don’t like anywhere but here.”

Every question Adam can think to ask would be a hypocritical one—_don’t you get lonely? Don’t you want something bigger?_—so he doesn’t ask. He just considers him for a minute. It’s a strange thing to sit here and recognize something in Ronan Lynch.

“What’re you doing?”

“Looking at you.”

“Quit it,” Ronan says, but his mouth is pleased.

Adam wordlessly puts up a hand to cover his eyes. The gesture makes him think of the circle of strangely-carved trees, of Ronan putting a fist to his eye socket and the strange mirror they made together.

“Come over here a second,” he says recklessly.

Ronan’s there and kissing him before Adam can even uncover his eyes. It’s brief and disorienting. Adam’s hands are unequipped for gentle touch, but one finds a curve of hot neck. The other reaches, finds a wrist to hold.

It lasts a breath, which is about all Adam can handle. Then Ronan’s up again, moving to dig through a drawer, casual except for a stubborn happy looseness around his mouth.

“Fucking cat shedded all over me. Let me change my shirt.”

Adam looks down at the sweatshirt in his lap, the familiar colors of the Aglionby crest. Some proud, perpetually-seventeen part of him wants to bristle and ask for another sweatshirt. But in the end, he puts it on and breathes its smell and sits on the bed. Ronan trades his dress shirt for worn black cotton, then comes to sit beside him again.

“Do you remember Noah?” he asks. “Czerny? He was at Aglionby, too.”

“No,” Adam says truthfully. He spent most of his semester at Aglionby trying to go unnoticed, eyes fixed down, hands twitching at the cuffs of his second-hand sweater. He ignored everyone, and those who glowed too bright to be ignored—Ganseyboy and his guard-dog Lynch, Henry Cheng and his petitions, the Bulgarian mobster kid who wrecked his car—he resented instead.

“You would’ve liked him,” Ronan says. He stretches a leg, catches the skateboard under the desk with the tip of his toe, drags it out. “Not me. You’d’ve hated me back then. But Noah was the best.”

He rolls the skateboard back and forth between his feet. Adam watches the side of his face, the low eyelashes over light eyes. Earlier today Ronan told him, _You don’t have to do anything you don’t want, _like he was offering him permission. Adam is drowning in that permission, groping for feeling, for some recognizable desire.

“What happened to him?”

“Car accident,” Ronan says briefly. He pushes the skateboard away, and they watch it roll across the room to nudge the opposing wall.“I did hate you a little” Adam admits. “All of you.”

Most of the time, he tries not to think about the Adam he was back then—living in the trailer and keeping his mouth shut, still straining against the inevitability of his circumstances. Maybe it’s the Aglionby crest on his lapel, maybe it’s Ronan’s childhood bedroom, maybe it’s the resurgence of _wanting_—but he feels closer to that old self. Close enough for pity, anyhow.

“What’d you want to do?” Ronan asks, like he’s reading Adam’s silence. “Before all the-“

He traces a sloppy sign of the cross, knuckles pressing briefly to Adam’s forehead, to his breastbone, to each of his shoulder blades.

“Don’t do that,” Adam says, flinches back. “Don’t make it a joke.”

Ronan’s eyes fix him with a strange appraisal. “You don’t even believe in God.”

“I already told you I do,” Adam says. When he glances down, his hands are worrying at the cuffs of the Aglionby pullover. In his bones, without his permission, he is still a freshman in a second-hand sweater. “I meant- I don’t want to play that game—_what would you be if you weren’t this_. It’s not productive.”

It’s a game he forbids himself to play even in his own head, even in his latest, unhappiest nights. If he’s learned anything from the trailer park, it’s self-preservation. How to put your head down and minimize the hurt.

“Productive,” Ronan says, like he’s tasting it.

“I just don’t see the point in dwelling on the past,” Adam says, understanding at once that it’s the wrong thing to say in this dreamy memory-soaked place, the wrong thing to say to Ronan Lynch. His mouth does something sharp.

“Fuck me for asking a question. Forgot you don’t like those.”

“That’s not fair,” Adam says, stung. He’s been honest—the fact that he’s stung at all is proof of that. “I don’t ask why you do the things you do, Ronan. I don’t ask why you stay here.”

“This is my home,” Ronan says, bristles visibly. It makes him look more like the Lynch from Aglionby—younger, sharper, at ease in his arrogance—and it’s a little easier to remember how Adam used to hate him, envy him. “This is where I’ve always lived.”

“Should I ask what you wanted to do, then? Or did you always plan to throw away your future here?”

Ronan laughs a little. “What, as opposed to you?”

Abruptly, he’s sorry he pushed at all. In his head, his father inquires, _Why you always gotta make things hard on yourself, Adam? Why you always gotta make it a fight?_

He could have simply worn the sweatshirt, kissed Ronan Lynch on his childhood bed, played along a while longer in this life he can’t have. But there is some inaccessible core of Adam that always pushes, like maybe he’s always bracing for the next hit. In his mind, he is always rehearsing the trailer park.

He says, coldly, “Don’t talk about things you don’t understand.”

Ronan’s eyes are blue and relentless. Adam’s only known him a week, but already he knows he would never hit him. He’ll tell the truth—that’s all. Adam’s been hit a fair amount. He knows how to take a hit. It’s much, much worse to sit here and have Ronan say the thing they both know:

“You don’t want to be a priest.”

Adam turns his face away, fixes his eyes on a light socket across the room. “Don’t be a dick.”

“Adam,” he says, touches him on the wrist. His fingers are light, but his voice is unyielding. “Whatever fucked up penance you think you’re doing- Or maybe you just don’t think you deserve to be happy-“

Adam has to stand to get away from it, from Ronan’s careful touch and unapologetic words. He startles upright, nearly hits his head on the hanging wooden mobile.

“Look,” he says, gestures raggedly between them, “I don’t know what you thought _this _was, but-“

Ronan laughs, caustic and a little hurt. “I’m not asking you to leave your fucking wife for me, Parrish. I’m playing the Other Woman to Jesus, I get it.”

“Don’t make a joke of it,” Adam says again, strangely close to begging. “This is my life, Ronan.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” he says steadily.

Adam’s turn to laugh, then. There’s a sort of heavy inevitability to this collision. If they’d met at Aglionby, perhaps they’d have staged this fight six years earlier, before Adam had the time to get his hopes up.

Fourteen years old, hot-faced and asking the grocery clerk to try his mother’s credit card again, he’d watched a Raven Boy move easily through the checkout line and swipe his card without a glance toward the total. Adam had to leave the toothpaste and cans of ravioli on the conveyer belt, but he’d carried the image of that careless boy all the way home.

The boy wasn’t Ronan and his magic couldn’t hold—by sixteen Adam was out of Aglionby, out of the trailer—but Adam thinks of him anyway, standing there while Ronan says easy indecent things like, _It doesn’t have to be_. Like, _You don’t have to do anything you don’t want. You know that, right?_

As if it were as easy as that.

He thinks, then, of another encounter at the same grocery store. He was maybe seventeen, fumbling with the kickstand of his terrible bicycle. His plastic grocery bag had torn, scattering his meager, generic-brand purchases across the sidewalk—cereal, deodorant, a quart of milk that burst splendidly, soaking through Adam’s sneakers. A small woman with an enormous quantity of fair hair had stopped, helped him gather his items, offered him one of her own grocery bags to hold his milk-sodden armful. There was a pie inside the bag and when he started to object, she waved a hand at him.

“Oh, no, I bought that one for you. I thought, there’s a boy who’ll sacrifice every bodily bit of himself in pursuit of his goals. I bet he doesn’t know how badly he needs a pie.”

He’d been too mortified—too struck with being seen—to speak.

She’d said kindly, “Stop fighting. Take the pie.”

He’d taken the pie, eaten it in mincing little slivers, made it last for days. And when the pie was finished, he was sorry it was gone. A few days later, he stopped fighting and told God, _okay You win. You have me. Do what You fucking will._

This is correlation not causation, but in the same way that his brain has always linked the boy in the grocery store with Ronan Lynch, he has always linked that pie with the promise he made to the moisture stain on the ceiling. He has given away every bodily bit of himself. He doesn’t have anything left to give.

He says, wearily, “It was never going to be like that. I thought you knew.”

“Fuck you,” Ronan says, face registering something more thoughtful than hurt. When he stands, he’s taller than Adam. “This isn’t about me wanting you. Go chop off your dick if that’s what you want, but make sure it’s what you _want_-”

“Must be nice to think like that,” Adam says. “To think about what I _want_ all the time. To have a- a house and brothers and _money_-”

“Don’t do that. Don’t make it about that.”

“It’s always,” Adam says, “about that.”

He steps back so Ronan can’t touch him. Not because he is afraid but because he is untouchable. That’s the only way he can bear any of this. Ronan’s hand reaches and then drops.

“You’re being dumb as shit about this.”

Adam shakes his head tiredly. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“You won’t let me,” Ronan says.

Adam’s shoulder lifts, drops. His eyes are on the light socket across the room and he can’t be touched. He says, “I better go.”

Ronan stands still, a terrible stillness, but he lets him go. Adam goes down the cramped little stairway, into the kitchen, out a backdoor into the summer night and lush sounds of this well-loved place. He was right to worry about parking beneath the plum tree; a few overripe ones have fallen and split sickly across his windshield—sweetness gone wrong, eclipsed planets.

Somewhere, cicadas. Somewhere, a lurking cat. Somewhere, a knife ringing against glass. The air hums around Adam, but no blows can land. He pulls down the driveway and away.

...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> don't h8 me I promise there's more 
> 
> “As a deer pants…” is Psalm 42:1, sorry for making it kinda horny. the verse Adam quotes "shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves" is Matthew 10:16
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](https://charactershoesfic.tumblr.com) if u wanna chat!! thank u for reading and drop me a line if you enjoyed!! writing conflict is my absolute worst nightmare so Im feeling a little nervousssss about this, my peacemaking libra rising is shakinggg rn ;)


	8. viii

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a story of the Lynch brothers. Like most good stories, it ends with a wedding. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> geez louise it's been a while, I'm so sorry for the wait!! this chapter was important and needed to cook in my brain for a little while, I guess. fittingly, the whole last section finally came together just in time for Holy Week, which is v fitting and pleasing to me. anyhow I hope you enjoy :) 
> 
> I don't believe there are any TW for this chapter, except for a brief allusion to past suicidal ideation.

**CHAPTER 8 **

In the morning, Ronan stands still and lets Matthew tie his tie. Probably Gansey’s clever hands could do a faster and neater job of it, but Matthew had stumbled into the bathroom to brush his teeth and found Ronan there, tie hanging like an undone noose, and he’d pushed right into his space, started making complicated knots. 

“I watched a Youtube video on this,” he says, dribbling a little bit of toothpaste. “There’s one knot that looks like a bull. It’s called a Taurus knot.”

“You’re not a Taurus,” Ronan says. 

“No,” Matthew says agreeably. “Hold on. I fucked it up. I gotta start again.”

Ronan waits, watches the blond crown of his brother’s head. Distantly, there is the percussive  _ beep-beep-beep _ of a catering van backing down the drive. Somewhere, the string quartet produces quavery, unsettling music as they tune their instruments. 

“They’ll all be gone tomorrow,” Matthew says comfortingly, but for once this knowledge fails to cheer Ronan. Tomorrow the wedding will be over and everyone will return to their lives—Gansey and Matthew to school, Declan and Ashley to their bullshit service honeymoon—and Ronan will stay here, milling about among the cats and the cows and his dead father’s curios, with nobody to visit but Noah at the graveyard and the stained glass window at the church. 

Briefly, for a happy and unbalanced day, he’d thought there might be Adam to visit. But that’s finished, too. It’s a fresh hurt now, but soon it will just be a familiar sort of ache—Ronan’s gotten pretty good at missing people. 

“Do you remember,” Matthew says, “how Mom used to do Dad’s tie for him? I used to watch.”

“Yeah,” Ronan says. Somehow it surprises him—not that Matthew remembers them, but that he can speak about them so easily. That it’s possible to miss a person without getting amberized in it. “I remember.”

After a couple more attempts, Matthew produces a very satisfactory knot, taps his knuckles against Ronan’s chin in victory, and resumes brushing his teeth. 

“Declan’s freaking out,” he says through a mouthful of foam. “You know when he gets stressed and starts talking like a real estate agent?”

He clasps his hands together in an uncanny Declan mannerism, and Ronan laughs. Matthew is pleased all over again. He spits into the sink, shoos a hand at Ronan. 

“Go make Declan do some breathing exercise shit. Calm him down. I have to shave.”

Ronan loves his brother, so he does not point out that babyfaced Matthew most definitely does not need to shave and that Ronan most definitely has never been a calming influence to Declan. He just messes up Matthew’s hair and allows himself to be ushered out of the bathroom. 

Downstairs, the house has dissolved into orderly havoc. Helen Gansey stands on the front porch, directing caterers and florists and photographers like a beautiful and formidable traffic cop. Ashley’s bridesmaids are mixing mimosas, curling eyelashes in the warped reflection of the kettle, voices half-stepping up a musical scale. 

“Oh, thank god,” Ashley says, which is not a greeting Ronan often merits. She’s sitting in a kitchen chair, being attended to by about four different people wielding hot curling instruments. “Declan’s doing the crazy manic weatherman thing. I can’t go calm him down because apparently if he sees me in my wedding gown it’ll taint the sacrament even though we’ve been, y’know, having premarital sex since high school.”

“God,” says one of the bridesmaids, “does that make you guys high school sweethearts? That’s  _ so  _ Middle America of you-“

“Don’t talk about sex in front of your future stepson,” another bridesmaid chides. 

Ashley barks a laugh so violent it causes a false eyelash to escape and scuttle sideways down her face like a hairy-legged spider.

“Declan is not my dad,” Ronan says. Then, for emphasis, he says it several more times. “ _ Not  _ my dad.  _ Not  _ my dad.”

“Good, go say that to Declan about fifteen times. He’ll find it therapeutic,” Ashley suggests. Her expression does not falter even as an attendant removes a significant amount of hair from her leg with strips of wax. “Check the barn.”

“You’ll never be my real mom,” Ronan tells her, but ducks out the kitchen door and into the bright morning.

It’s the very yellowest August, the kind of morning that makes Ronan think of his mother, who liked to remark on mornings like this that the Barns had turned out its pockets for them _ , _ producing all its small beauties and grubby oddities. 

He stands still for a moment, letting a pack of harried-looking musicians pass him by, and tries to see this place with their fresh eyes, tries to imagine himself as an outsider here. But it’s impossible for him to divorce his gaze from his love for this place; he knows it too well. That’s loving, for Ronan—to know a thing as well as it will allow.

He goes to his father’s office, where he knows Declan will be. 

He’s prepared for it this time, so it doesn’t shake him so badly—the brief and tilting moment where he sees a man in a chair, a bowed black head over a sheaf of papers, and thinks of his father. Declan’s shed his tuxedo jacket, but otherwise he is dressed for a wedding. 

“Hey, shitlord,” Ronan says. “Are you runaway bride-ing or what?”

“I can’t get out,” Declan says. “I’m trapped.”

“That’s kinda fucked up,” Ronan says, putting up his chin to consider the overhead light, silhouetted with a number of dried insect corpses. “She’s not so bad.”

“I’m stuck, Ronan,” Declan says in his calmest and most businesslike tone.

“Nah,” Ronan says. “You want me to get these people to leave?”

“No, my foot,” Declan says. He turns in the office chair, lifts one black designer shoe to demonstrate his predicament. “My foot is caught in a glue trap.”

This brings Ronan about sixty seconds of uninterrupted laughter. Declan submits to it quietly, which is further indication that he’s losing his shit. He rustles through the papers in his lap, as if to comfort himself with the sounds of efficiency. 

“Why do we have cats, if not to catch mice? Why do we need glue traps?”

“Everyone needs to stop interrogating my cats,” Ronan says. He kneels on the dusty floor and makes a few fruitless attempts at dislodging the glue trap from Declan’s shoe. It’s a very old glue trap—possibly another relic of Niall in this office—but its hold is deadly. “Why are you in here anyway?”

“I was checking for mice,” Declan says thinly. He allows Ronan to tug at his shoe for a while. “You’d really make them all leave?”

“If you wanted me to.” Ronan abandons the glue trap and turns his attention to Declan’s shoelaces, which are joylessly knotted with characteristic rigor. The knots are something of a wonder. “It’s what I do best.”

“These shoes are bespoke,” Declan says sadly, but he holds his foot still and allows Ronan to untie the laces. Ronan can’t recall ever having Declan lace his shoes as a kid, let alone the other way around, and still something about their position fills him with a strange twist of nostalgia. He’s thinking of tying Matthew’s laces, maybe, or of having his own small shoes knotted by his father. 

“Well now you can rest fucking easy,” Ronan says, sitting back as the last stubborn knot finally comes undone. Declan slips his foot sadly from its shoe. “No mice at your dumbshit wedding.”

“You said she wasn’t so bad,” Declan says. He keeps holding his socked foot in the air like he’s unwilling to put it down on the dusty barn floor. Ronan, pants already furry with white dust, rolls his eyes and starts unlacing his own shoes. “You don’t lie.”

“I don’t,” Ronan says. “You do. Bullshit you were checking for mice.”

Declan doesn’t immediately answer. He takes the shoe that Ronan thrusts at him and puts it on slowly. When he’s done, he grimaces at Ronan for a while. 

“Fuck off,” Ronan says, offended. “You and your bullshit tailor picked these shoes out for me. Now they’re not good enough for you?”

“I came in here,” Declan says, ignoring this, “because I wanted to feel close to them. You know, I never thought I’d- You’re supposed to have your parents at your wedding.”

Ronan is very surprised. All he can do is hand Declan his other shoe. Declan takes it, rolls his eyes, turns his face down to his task. 

“You don’t have to look so surprised. You thought I didn’t miss them?”

“I don’t know,” Ronan says. He doesn’t know. It’s a simple enough thought— _ Declan misses them, too _ —and yet it’s novel to him. He feels dumb and young in the way he only ever gets around his brother, dusty and sock-footed and sitting at Declan’s feet like a child. 

“Selfish of you,” Declan says, but there’s no bite behind it. Shoes tied, he lets his feet drop to the floor with a  _ thump  _ and a brief cloud of dust. He doesn’t move to stand, only tips back his head to stare at the ceiling. 

“Sorry,” Ronan says eventually, and it’s not exactly the right response and it’s not exactly what he means. 

“I think I thought,” Declan says, like Ronan never spoke at all, “if we got everything else right—the music and the flowers and the venue—I could slip right through the wedding without even noticing they were missing. Ashley wanted a courthouse wedding.”

“Fucking secularist.” 

Declan half-smiles like he’s grateful for the normalcy of Ronan’s shittyness, but he remains slumped in his chair. Ronan aims a kick at him. 

“Hey. I mean it. I’ll make them all leave.”

“No,” Declan says, “better not. It’s not Ashley, it’s everything else. I just wish-”

He doesn’t finish the sentence. Ronan registers for the first time that the papers in Declan’s lap are not his marriage vows, but stacks of their father’s old paperwork—receipts and inventories, peppery black Xerox documents, all scrawled in Niall’s fine bold signature. It’s a mundane little stack, no fitting tribute to their singular father. 

“C’mon,” Ronan says, administers another gentle kick. “Fuckin- buck up.”

As he stands he kicks up a little flurry of dust, sets the crackly papers on the wall shivering, and for a moment he and Declan are the only still things among the shivers. Two boys in a graveyard. 

“We’ll be okay,” he says.

Declan’s mouth makes an unfamiliar shape, and then he nods and stands. Ronan puts the gluey shoe and the trap into the trashcan, and then follows Declan out barefoot, trashbag swinging from his hand—its contents shifting and settling, shoes and scraps of paper and several empty coke cans. 

…

This is a story of the Lynch brothers. Like most good stories, it ends with a wedding. 

Ronan sits in the pew that reads  _ dedicated in the name of Niall and Aurora Lynch  _ and watches his older brother get married. He says “Amen” when he’s meant to, kneels when he’s meant to. He bows his head and watches the jewel-toned light through the stained glass window as the priest offers intentions and reads aloud his parents’ names. 

Adam’s there—a humming certainty even before Ronan finds him in the crowd— at the side of the altar, still and quiet. He stands to help administer communion, and Ronan flickers between hope and dread the entire way up the aisle, until Adam lifts his eyes to Ronan and holds his gaze impassively. 

“The Body of Christ,” he says, white cassock falling away from fine brown wrists, light catching gold at the crown of his head. 

“Amen,” Ronan says like he’s meant to, and takes the host in his mouth. 

Just like that Declan is married and the church is emptying itself into the fine August afternoon and Matthew’s slinging an arm around Ronan’s neck, humming off-key to the wedding march, and the bridesmaids are flinging armfuls of white petals in fragrant flurries, and Gansey ducks around a photographer, says nothing but stands beside Ronan in handsome happy company. 

…

Here are the Lynch brothers in the doorway of the sweet-smelling barn where they swung as boys. A dark head, a shaved head, a blonde head—all turning to follow the flight of a dozen white doves, bursting upwards toward the trees. 

A photograph is taken at this very moment, and later on it will be considered remarkable—not for any special technique or lay of the light, but for catching all three brothers in a smile. Mouths open in identical shouts of laughter, it is the most they have ever resembled each other. 

In the afternoon sun, a flurry of white doves joins Chainsaw’s solitary gyre. A string quartet plays warm familiar-sounding jazz. Matthew allows a child to stand on the toes of his shoes while Declan is too busy to moan about scuffed leather. They make a clumsy circuit of the dance floor together. 

Ronan doesn’t know who the child belongs to. Possibly Matthew stole it. 

“You don’t know her?” Gansey asks, not especially surprised. His own childhood was one of being dragged to formal events and then left to “play nicely” while his parents mingled and drank. 

“I don’t know any of these people,” Ronan says. 

Somewhere in the length of an afternoon, the Barns has been overrun with politicians and academic-types, the kind of people Declan and Ashley rub shoulders with in DC, the kind of people who use the phrase  _ rub shoulders _ . They eat small hors d’oeuvres and mill about the barn and wait in line to greet the bride and groom beneath the flowering plum trees, talking about summer homes and charity galas and political primaries.

“You know me,” Gansey says comfortingly. “You know Jane.”

The small ill-tempered waitress—“My name is  _ Blue _ and it’s a perfectly sound name,  _ thanks _ .”—raises her glass of champagne at Ronan in salute. She’s dressed very formally, in that there’s no plastic drinking utensils in her hair. Her dress is a floaty tulle-thing that masks any hint of a feminine silhouette, and instead presents as vaguely Pomeranian. Gansey, from the warm-faced glances he keeps casting her way, is a dog-lover.

“Not really,” says Ronan.

“I’m unknowable,” she says cheerfully. 

Ronan feels equally opaque, almost unrecognizable. He should be feeling strangled by his suit and tie, probably. He should have his hackles up at all these strangers treading his personal holy ground. He should feel some fury over his brother’s parade of hand-clasping  _ hellos _ . 

Gansey keeps glancing at him sideways like he’s expecting bad behavior. Ronan isn’t sure why he can’t oblige. 

“Seems like all’s quiet on the feline front,” Helen reports, ducking between them to exchange her empty flute of champagne for a full one. She nods at Ronan. “Unless your crow tries to attack one of the doves.” 

“She’s a raven.”

“She may be a corrupting influence,” Gansey says, and Ronan grins at this. 

“Cats really are harmful to the ecosystem,” Blue says. “They’re the only creatures who hunt recreationally. Not for food, but for  _ fun _ .”

“Metal as hell,” Ronan says. 

“You have a pet bird,” Blue says. “You of all people should be concerned.”

“Not a pet.”

“More of an occult familiar,” Gansey says. 

“Be careful,” Helen says, “for a scary-looking bastard, he’s real sensitive about his cats.”

“Jane is studying ecology,” Gansey tells his sister. “She’s leaving soon for a month of fieldwork in Belize.”

Ronan squints at her. “I thought you were a waitress.”

She squints back. “I contain multitudes. Also, things cost money.”

Ronan decides that he likes the waitress. He would steal toilet paper for her again, should she ever ask. To signal this new loyalty, he slides her the bottle of champagne. She takes it. 

“I think fieldwork is the height of academic pursuit,” Gansey says in his grand way, which should be insufferable but is instead charming and sincere. “Everyone should stomp around a field in their boots for a while. It would make the rest of academia more bearable.”

“Gansey hates school,” Helen tells Blue in a stage-whispered aside. When Gansey looks affronted, she makes a face of well-intentioned surprise at him. “What, don’t you know? Don’t you know you hate it there?”

“I don’t hate Georgetown,” Gansey says, and then opens his mouth like he’s going to rattle out a defense. No such defense follows. His eyebrows press together. 

Ronan takes the champagne from Blue and pushes it into Gansey’s willing hands. 

“God, sorry,” says Helen. She gives her brother an awkward pat. “I keep forgetting not everyone’s as self-aware as me. My therapist and I  _ just  _ talked about how I need to stop pushing people into introspection.”

“Do I hate school?” Gansey appeals to Ronan. He shrugs.

“I’m a corrupting influence.”

“I’ll go make sure the doves didn’t die, then,” Helen says, backing away. “Oh, there’s your little priest.”

She’s speaking to Gansey, but the word  _ your _ still makes Ronan’s head lift. He finds Adam standing next to the shitty pastor, who is shaking hands with Ashley’s parents and a couple crusty old professors. Adam is underdressed in his plain button down, face composed, posture faintly miserable. Without the white cassock and the certainty of ceremony, he looks boyish and rumpled and human. Ronan’s hand is pressed to his mouth before he remembers he removed his leather bracelets for the ceremony; his teeth sink into the dry cuff of his blazer.

“Adam Parrish!” Gansey says, hailing him.

“I’m going somewhere else,” Ronan says, and he does. 

He finds Matthew, and for a while they are both trapped in conversation with a very old woman who claims to be “a friend of the family” although she will not clarify which family. Ronan has just decided she must be an acquaintance of Ashley’s when the bride herself appears, tugging the brothers away for another round of photos and mouthing  _ who’s that _ ? 

A hot, bright stretch of minutes. The photographer’s lights and the afternoon sun burn into Ronan’s vision, turning everything hazy and oversaturated. 

“Just the families now,” the photographer urges, sending two assistants to herd the bridesmaids away. “Just the Lynch family.”

The three brothers stand together—the entirety of the Lynch family, all that’s left of them—and Declan’s perfectly posed hand goes tight on Ronan’s arm, just for a second. Ronan doesn’t smile for the camera, but he holds still under Declan’s grip until the photographer is finished and he can blink the twin ghost-lights from his vision. 

…

Back at the table where Ronan left his drink, he finds Gansey caught in earnest conversation with Henry Cheng, an Aglionby alum who Ronan recalls hating for reasons that he’s forgotten. 

He has a vague idea that Cheng’s parents were business associates of Niall’s—hence his presence at Declan’s wedding—and thus probably belong on the list of Possible Murderers of Niall Lynch. But it’s a long list and Ronan doesn’t really hold that against Cheng. There are myriad other reasons to dislike him; he is wearing a white suit dotted all over with tiny embroidered bumblebees, he is capturing Gansey’s attention, and he’s drinking a White Russian. 

“Don’t worry, Mr. Lynch,” he says, lifting it at Ronan in kingly welcome. “It’s non-dairy milk. I’m not an animal.”

Ronan gives him his best dead-eyed stare, but his heart’s not really in it. He feels scattered and strange. He can’t help glancing across the table, where the waitress and the seminarian have their heads close together in spirited argument. 

Blue is saying, “So Big Old God knows exactly what I’m gonna do and every choice I’m gonna make for my whole life. And somehow  _ that’s  _ free will?”

“It’s not predetermined,” Adam’s hands trace an inscrutable trajectory. “The idea is that God is outside of time. Or- equidistant from all points in time. Like the center of a circle.”

“Jane started interrogating Adam’s views on free will.” Gansey grimaces politely. “Getting on like a house on fire, is that the phrase? Very uncomfortable for anyone inside the house.”

They are a mismatched pair, but somehow they go together—a little off-color, a little underdressed. Roadside wildflowers amid a hothouse. Blue sips her champagne, waves a dismissive hand.

“You don’t need to explain circular time to me, I’m the daughter of a psychic.”

“I was told it is not polite to talk religion and politics at a party,” Cheng says. “I would have brought buttons. I make very good buttons.”

“You deal in  _ predicting the future _ .” Adam’s hands are forming agitated shapes. He’s more present in his own bones than usual, like Blue’s fired him up. “And you believe in free will? Don’t you see the contradiction in that?”

“I was telling Henry how much I enjoy my studies,” Gansey tells Ronan, looking a little desperate. “How exceptional the faculty is.”

“He hates it there,” Ronan tells Cheng. 

“I don’t care to examine it too closely,” Blue says crossly. “And I don’t care to have some Big Old God hula-hooping with the circle of all-being time.”

“Well now you’re just deliberately misunderstanding me.”

“You!” says Blue, jabs her fork across the table. Gansey and Cheng both flinch away, so the accusing fork lands on Ronan. “Free will. Yes or no?”

At Ronan’s blank-eyed scowl she rolls her eyes and elaborates, drawing some hula-hoop shapes in the air with the bit of shrimp at the end of her fork. 

“You think Big Old God knows what you’re gonna do before you do it?”

“A heavy question,” Cheng says, “to ponder before _l’entree_.”

“I’m none of God’s business,” Ronan says. He looks at Adam because he can’t hold out any longer. “Parrish.”

His mouth turns up at one side. “Lynch.”

There’s no further conversation because someone taps a knife against their glass and someone else takes it up, until the room is ringing with the sound. Matthew stands amid the music clamor, fusses with his hopelessly lopsided tie, and unfurls a yellow legal pad.

“Good God,” says Gansey, “that’s not the draft I approved this morning.”

Declan seems to have come to the same realization. Behind his unshakeable politician’s smile, his face is twitching through the stages of grief. Ashley tactfully trades his empty glass of champagne with her own full one. 

“Hi everybody, thanks for coming today to celebrate the love between Declan and Ashley,” Matthew says. He makes another attempt to straighten his tie, and the carefully wrought Taurus knot gives way entirely, unraveling. 

“I’m Declan’s brother Matthew, the best man. Yeah,  _ best  _ man, but I don’t want to brag. He’s only got two brothers, I had a 50-50 shot at it. Honestly the real winner here is Ashley, ‘cause Declan actually dated three girls—uh, sorry, women—called Ashley. So the odds of her being here? 33.3333 repeating. Yeah. Let’s clap for Ashley.”

There is some scattered clapping, led resoundingly by Ronan. 

“Good God,” Gansey repeats, defeated. 

It’s a characteristically Matthew speech—meandering, funny, sweet, and occasionally inexplicable. He thankfully omits the story about walking in on the happy couple mid-coitus. He does tell the story about Declan almost drowning him, but it somehow works:

“-and after my dad dragged us in, he said  _ don’t cry anymore Matthew, you’re alright now _ . But I wasn’t crying out of fear, I was crying ‘cause I was pissed he dragged us in. I was having fun! And that’s how I learned that love is fucking scary and intense. Love is not telling your little brother that you’re both drowning until you’re safe on shore. It’s feeling all the bad stuff so the other person doesn’t have to. It’s brave as shit. Declan’s brave as shit. Ashley, oh my god, you’re brave as  _ shit _ -“

Scattered and vaguely scandalized laughter. Ashley is patting Declan on the back, perhaps a gesture of comfort, perhaps to ensure he isn’t choking on his own tongue.

“Love is horrible!” Matthew says, almost a yell and he’s grinning real wide. “My dad—some of you knew him—he used to leave for weeks at a time, to travel all over the world finding art and antiques. Most he sold, but the best stuff he’d keep. The best stuff was for my mom. When he came back I would always ask,  _ why do you have to go again?  _ And he’d say,  _ to find something beautiful for your mother _ . And I’d think how terrible love was, because it drove my dad out of the house. It drove him restless.”

Ronan experiences a chime of pain, brief and sweet as a knife against glass. There’s a movement behind him—Gansey’s hand at the back of his chair. 

“My mom’s not here,” Matthew says simply, “but she used to say this. She used to say, if we’re all born with love, then life is about choosing the right place to put it. Isn’t that nice? I think it’s nice. It’s nice you don’t have to do something as brave as love by yourself.” 

Matthew, sunny and gold, lifts his glass. “To Ashley and to Declan. Sláinte mhaith.”

…

The evening unfolds in a fizzy, golden haze—more speeches, more photos, more food. Matthew grins a sheepish apology at Gansey and allows first Declan and then Ashley and finally Ronan to hug him hard and rough. Another course. The string quartet plays the upbeat, rollicking reels that Ronan learned in music lessons as a boy. He finds himself counting the tempo in his head— _ oneandtwoandoneandtwoand— _ and shares a grin when he catches Declan’s eye, finds him tapping out the same beat. 

He realizes somewhere towards dessert that he’s hardly spoken all night. He feels strangely still as the lighted party rattles around him, the middle pole in some golden carousel. 

He feels— loose. A fist come unclenched. It’s absence, but not the usual kind, and Ronan doesn’t know how to feel it. 

“Alright?” Gansey puts a hand on his shoulder, jostles him around a little. Ronan puts his head back to consider him—handsome in his suit, face colored with champagne, hair tousled like some tragic boyish war hero. 

“Fine,” he says. “I’m being good. Dance with your mean waitress.” 

“She’s not mean,” Gansey says in a sort of pleased, unconvincing way. He squeezes Ronan’s shoulder. “You  _ are  _ being good.”

Ronan watches him go, pulling Blue away from her interrogation of Adam’s theology to the dance floor. The sheer volume of her dress prevents Gansey from getting too close, but he endeavors. They look nice together, even as they seem to battle over who gets to lead the dance. The effect is somewhat like a mobile arm-wrestling match. It makes Ronan feel that complicated pang of  _ rightness _ , of loving Gansey, of wanting to tear something to shreds. 

But somewhere along the weird hula hoop of time he’s living, Ronan stopped being seventeen and he stopped being angry at Declan, so he does not make a scene. He undoes his tie and leaves it on the table and goes outside into the graying evening. 

Helen Gansey and Henry Cheng are sitting on the back porch steps under the stooped dogwood tree, passing a dab pen between them. Ronan thinks about glaring at them, but can’t quite muster it. 

“This tree smells like a hairdryer,” Helen greets him. Cheng holds out the dab pen, but Ronan shakes his head. 

“I’m good, man,” he says. To Helen, “It got struck by lightning.”

“This place,” Helen says, and laughs in a way that should probably send Ronan’s hackles up. “Trees struck by lightning and secret fields and tame birds. It’s like a fairytale. Do you know how much money we’d make renting this place out for events? You’re breaking my heart.”

Ronan shrugs. “I don’t believe in money.”

“Cheers to that.” Cheng lifts his dab pen, as if to toast Ronan.

“Spoken like a couple of trustfund brats,” Helen sighs, and takes the pen from Cheng. Exhaling smoke through her teeth, she points a perfect fingernail at Ronan. “Don’t tell Gansey about this.”

“It’s a secret,” Ronan agrees, and he leaves them to smoke on his porch, tramping out into the fields which are dark and untouched by the strangeness and merriment of the wedding. 

...

Declan’s shoe got stuck in a glue trap, so he’s currently wearing Ronan’s dress shoes, and so Ronan is currently wearing the only other acceptable pair of shoes he owns—the black dress shoes required by the Aglionby dresscode. Helen retrieved them from a pile of muckboots and sneakers missing mates, where they presumably hid to avoid being burned with the rest of Ronan's Aglionby attire when he dropped out.

They fit okay, a little pinched around the toes; Ronan’s grown a bit since seventeen. Improbably, in this standstill place, he’s grown. If he were to go and stand against the old pine tree where Niall notched their heights as boys, he would stand well above the last notch carved into the sap-sticky bark. 

This thought strikes him dull and sad and hard enough that he stops walking, has to stand still in the middle of a dark stretch of mud. 

He thinks about the circle Adam’s beautiful hands traced in the air, describing time, describing a God who experienced all time at once. 

He thinks if that’s true, then at this moment there is a Ronan standing tall as his father measures his height against a tree, and there is a Ronan finding his father’s roadkill body at the end of the driveway—a Ronan glancing sideways to Noah’s car as the opposing stoplight flicks yellow, a Ronan watching his brother get married in a church, being kissed in a church, bleeding out in a church. 

And in the middle of it all, God. This is a story, unavoidably, about God.

“Fuck you,” Ronan says aloud to the dark, empty field. 

But even those words feel unconvincing, deflated. Whatever temperamental motor has been humming in Ronan’s chest for so long, it’s silent now. Maybe it’s the strange peace he’s come to with Declan. Maybe it’s the incoming fall. Maybe he’s just getting old.

He feels, briefly, like he’s standing in the middle of a loop, equidistant from every terrible version of himself. 

And then he just feels sad—not the familiar furious grief that’s kept him company for so long. Just sad. He keeps walking. 

…

Ronan’s father carved the praying trees for the same reason he shaved his face every morning, didn’t hit his boys when they misbehaved, sang bawdy Irish folksongs when he came up the porch steps after a long time away, disappeared for weeks at a time in pursuit of some beautiful purposeless curio—to please Aurora. 

_ Isn’t it the most holy thing in the world _ , he would say,  _ to go out walking in God’s great earth? Isn’t that the closest thing we got to praying?  _ And then, more sternly to Ronan,  _ that don’t mean little boys get to skip church. You do like you’re told and put your church clothes on. A shirt that buttons. _

Niall Lynch, hypocrite.

Every Sunday Aurora would take the Lynch boys to church, and every Sunday Niall Lynch would troop out back to the circle of scrunch-faced trees with a radio and a chisel. After church the Lynch boys might climb the trees and shout along to the fuzzy Gaelic radio station. They might bring their tin whistles out to practice their lessons merrily while their father carved religion into bark. 

But after Sunday dinner the hollow was for their mother alone, and Niall would take her hand and lead her out among the trees to see his day’s work, and she would smile and survey and say it was good. And so it was good. 

This was religion, too—imperfect and woody—because religion wasn’t God. Religion was only the thing you promised yourself to. 

Ronan moves in between the trees and puts a thumb to the grooves of Latin carved there. As if sensing his presence, the cicadas pick up their song suddenly—a chittering crescendo, frenzied and almost frightening—and for a second the whole forest seems alive around Ronan, not quite anchored in time. Like if he timed it right, ducked under the right branch, he might step out into his childhood and cross the footbridge and find his father coming to fetch him for dinner or bedtime or simply because he wanted an admiring audience and nobody but Ronan would do.

But it’s not his father who steps through the trees—only Adam.

It’s a strange moment of possibility, so potent that Ronan doesn’t even register shock, only rightness. Probably he was waiting for Adam to come all along.

Adam says, “Tell me if you’d rather be by yourself.”

Ronan is always by himself. He opens his mouth to say something cruel, and says instead, “I’m always by myself.”

“Me, too,” Adam says, smiles a little. 

It’s dark and he’s a pale, washed-out thing. Ronan isn’t really angry with him, only raw and wretched. He puts the cuff of his shirt between his teeth and watches Adam make a careful circuit of the praying trees. He stops at  _ Jesus falls a second time _ . 

He says, “I was disappointed when you brought me out here and I saw they were prayers. I thought,  _ I can’t get away from it _ .”

“It?”

“God,” Adam says, turns to make a rueful face at Ronan. “But it was the bird you were trying to show me.”

“Chainsaw,” Ronan supplies. He stands still, keeps looking. “I’m not that fucking boring.”

“No,” Adam agrees, smiles a little like he’s thinking about a joke that Ronan’s not in on. 

He goes back to the Stations of the Cross, quiet except for the rustle of leaves and crabapples underfoot. Ronan stands still and watches him a little sideways, the way his father taught him to approach a wild animal. 

“I said yesterday,” Adam says presently, “that I don’t ask why you stay here. I’m sorry about that.”

“About saying it?”

“About not asking.”

Ronan feels a sting of sadness at Adam’s steady brown face, at how much he likes him, at how doomed this all is. He thinks he doesn’t know how to answer this question, and then just as quickly he does. 

“Remember I told you about Noah? How he died in a car accident? I was in the other car. We were racing, he died, I didn’t. It wasn’t supposed to go that way.”

Adam doesn’t move or nod or speak, but he’s got that listening stillness. HIs eyes watch. “How d’you figure?”

Ronan’s hand finds a tree, fingers ghosting over the splintery form of a bowed Jesus, of a woman who looks like his mother wiping his face with a cloth. 

“You remember me at Aglionby,” he says. “You know I wasn’t aiming to live this long.”

He doesn’t have the refuge of a confessional screen. Adam looks at him steadily and without pity.

“So what,” he says, “this is your fucked up penance?”

This is, impossibly, a joke. Neither laughs, but they both understand it is a joke. Ronan wishes for his leather bracelets, for something to grip.

He kicks some leaves off a knot of roots, severs a dead black branch. When he looks back at Adam, he’s watching him work with a wistful look. It makes Ronan think of the sacristy, of the casual ceremony of Adam’s hands moving among holy things. This—clipping branches and clearing rot—is religion, too. 

He says, “We’re pretty fucking sad, aren’t we?”

“It’s not productive to think that way,” Adam says. But he sits down on a stump and puts his chin in his graceful hand and looks up at Ronan until he sits down beside him. This close, there’s a cheap soap smell amid rotten crabapples and damp leaves and a faraway bonfire. He says, “I wish we met-“

Adam doesn’t finish, but Ronan knows what he means because he half-spoke this sentence in the church days ago.  _ I wish we met earlier, before we promised ourselves to other gods.  _

“ _ That’s  _ not fucking productive,” Ronan says, but he’s drained of anger. The cicadas throb around them like tinnitus. The leaves scuttle dryly with some small wind. 

“I know,” Adam says, “but still.”

It’s a very human thing to say. It gives Ronan the bravery to turn his head and look Adam right in his gaunt face. In the Nino’s parking lot with his nose bloody, he thought Adam looked like something off a prayer card—untouchable and cool—and now that thought makes him sorry. He thinks,  _ lonesome _ . 

As if he’s sharing this thought, Adam puts out a hand and touches the bridge of Ronan’s nose, the old healed-over crack from some forgotten childhood blow. Then his hand falls back to his lap. 

“The worst thing is that-“ Adam makes a face and doesn’t finish. His shoulder lifts, drops. As if to comfort himself, he says aloud, “It’ll pass.”

Ronan thinks this probably isn’t true. He’s lived a long time in the company of absence, and it’s not a thing that gets smaller with time. Either way, he isn’t comforted. Possibly he can’t think of anything worse than to feel something only in passing. 

He says, “I think you’re doing the wrong thing.”

Adam smiles a little. “I know."

Around them, the trees pray. Adam stands with a scuttle of leaves, hands brushing at his knees in a way that is boyish and young and makes Ronan’s throat hurt. 

“See you next Sunday?” Then, “That’s a joke.”

“Fuck, no,” Ronan says.

“Fuck no,” he agrees. A wan little smile. He puts his knuckle to his eye, lifts a shoulder as if to fold in on himself, and leaves. 

Ronan sits. Very far away, barely audible between pulses of cicada song, the string quartet is playing eerie Johnny Cash:  _ softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling _ . Abruptly he is aware that he is not alone, and he has a brief and strange moment where he thinks he might turn his head and find another Ronan Lynch standing amid the trees—a hundred terrible versions of himself, maybe. 

But it’s only a fox, sitting still beneath the tree carved with  _ Jesus meets his mother _ . 

His yellow eyes consider Ronan, track the motion when he shakes his head, jabs a finger in the direction of Adam’s retreat. 

“He went that way.”

An ear twitches. The cicadas shriek, subside, and the fox pads off. Ronan sits for a while longer amid the praying trees, and then he follows too. 

…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *"this feeling" by Alabama Shakes starts playing* 
> 
> JK JK THERE'S ANOTHER CHAPTER I PROMISE WE'RE NOT FINISHED YET
> 
> ok no major biblical references this time, only major credit to @nonbinaryparrish on tumblr for introducing me to "softly and tenderly" by johnny cash which is a MAJOR VIBE
> 
> this chapter borrows a bit more heavily from fleabag (specifically s2e6 because it's so pitch perfect) than usual, but I tried my very best to marry it with trc, so I hope it worked for you! lmk if any fleabag references stuck out particularly to you or if you have a fave line! those always make me smile a lot!! 
> 
> hope everyone's staying safe and healthy, sending love!!!! say hi on [tumblr](https://charactershoesfic.tumblr.com) if you want! ok bye!


	9. epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a story about gods, big and small. Let me set the scene. We're almost done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was planning to wait and post this Sunday morning for symbolic reasons, but I’m feeling excited and can’t wait!! No content warnings here.
> 
> I would only humbly suggest you put the song "Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America" by the 1975 on repeat, and then enjoy (:

This is a story about gods, big and small. Ronan Lynch believed in God. Sometimes He was a swollen creek, an overturned wheelbarrow, a cantankerous goat. Sometimes He is a bastard. Mostly He is just disappointingly reticent. 

Like most people Ronan’s said  _ fuck you _ to—Declan, the Aglionby headmaster, many a traffic court bailiff—God seems to have decided to ignore Ronan in the hopes that he will tire himself out. This arrangement suits them both well. Ronan’s autumn days are full of small, sacred routines. He feeds the cows. He crosses the fields, bowing his head against the driving rain. He does not go back to church. 

He sits on the floor of his father’s office and sorts through stacks of yellowing paperwork. Niall’s photos still hang on the wall—the feast of Saint Brigid, two boys at play by the sea—but they’re joined by a new photo of the Lynch brothers at the wedding, a flyer from a farmers’ market, a postcard from Belize. 

Once a week, he goes and visits Noah at the graveyard. He thinks of him more frequently than that—every time he idles at a red light while the opposing light flicks yellow—but he limits his visits to once a week. He’s trying to live a life outside the graveyard. 

So he visits on Tuesdays. Pours sizzling Diet Coke into the dirt. Sorts his father’s papers into piles. Sends Declan proof of life once a week. Picks up the phone when Gansey calls. 

At first, these calls are determinedly cheerful—“I  _ told  _ you I enjoy school”—and then increasingly these calls are from the Gansey that Ronan most dislikes, vague and polite and dutiful. A martyr in spectacles and topsiders.

“Ditch school and let’s break into a junkyard,” Ronan suggests. “You sound ten minutes from suicide. C’mon, we’ll make those orange-vodka slushees that make you puke.”

“No,” Gansey says mournfully. “I have an annotated bibliography and a happy hour.”

He does a sigh that makes Ronan love him all over again, makes him light up with recognition for the restless Gansey he spent high school following. It used to make him feel savagely guilty to know that he loved Gansey best when he was dissatisfied, but now he understands that this sigh is Gansey giving him a gift—letting him see a part of Gansey that nobody else gets. 

He says, “I have cows to feed.”

Gansey says, “Oh to be seventeen.”

This is not quite what they’re both wishing for, but Ronan knows what he means. It would be nice to clamber through a junkyard and slice his palm open on something rusty, to drink vodka-orange slush right out of the blender. It would be nice to sit in tepid sadness, to be led by nothing but a feeling of discontent. Not nice, maybe, but—easier. 

“Will you visit Noah today?” Gansey asks, because these are shared memories. They lived seventeen together. There are stories Ronan tells that might have been Gansey’s originally, might have been Noah’s. Back then if one of them was cut, they all felt the sting. 

“Yeah,” Ronan says, and the phone line is quiet except for a faint buzz of distance and of missing things. 

“Tell him hi for me,” says Gansey. “Talk soon.” 

…

Ronan misses Gansey’s next phone call—three days later—because of a flooding situation in an outer barn. He comes home late, soaked, to a voicemail from Gansey that makes time go all strange and buzzing, because it’s a voicemail from the Gansey he loves best. 

Gansey alight, strange and righteous and hard to look at. Gansey ablaze, declaring he’s just been to the provost’s office and he’s going on sabbatical and does Ronan remember why they ever stopped looking for Glendower. Because more and more, Gansey is wondering. 

“I wonder,” he says again, once Ronan’s called him back. 

It’s an obvious statement. He might as well say  _ I breathe _ . Gansey wonders, therefore he is Gansey. 

“I wonder,” he says it again, “do you hear much from Adam?”

Ronan’s sitting on the back porch in his muddy clothes, just out of reach of the rain. Summer’s over but the October rain still carries a hot, hazy smell of ozone. The lightning-struck magnolia petals have gone gold, brown, then rotten in the grass. Twice this month he’s nearly swerved off the road to avoid the yellow-eyed stare of a fox. 

“No,” he says. There’s a mumble of noise on Gansey’s end, some overhead announcement of arrival or departure. He says, “You think you’re gonna find Glendower in Belize?” 

“It’s unlikely,” Gansey admits blithely, “but there are other attractions.”

The rain is coming down steady and quieting, bidding  _ shhh shhh shhh _ . Ronan thinks that if the rain keeps up overnight, the back creek will swell, spill over the plank bridge that leads to the praying trees. Another place he doesn’t visit. 

He says, “Remember when you wouldn’t come over on my birthday and help me burn shit when I dropped out? Because you said you were a  _ conscientious objector _ ? Welcome to delinquency, baby.”

“I’m taking,” Gansey says, strained, “a sabbatical from graduate school, Ronan. I’m hardly a dropout. Don’t make me think about it too much, I’ll start panicking. I didn’t even pack my airplane Ambien, my god.”

“Want me to come get you?” Ronan says, mostly joking but also mentally calculating the distance from here to Dulles International. “I’ll sprint through TSA, I don’t care.”

“No,” Gansey says, which means  _ thank you _ , “best not to make a scene. I’ll text you when I land. Will you answer?”

“Probably,” Ronan says, which means  _ yes.  _ “Tell the waitress I said what’s up.”

“Okay,” says Gansey, and he doesn’t hang up. Quiet. Then, “Ronan?”

He says it like he did that day in the junkyard long ago, when Ronan caught a bee and killed it between his hands. Another version of Gansey, one he doesn’t get too much—Gansey afraid. 

He says, “You’re okay.”

Gansey breathes out like he did once the bee was dead. “Thank you. Love you.”

“Bye,” Ronan says. 

He sits on the porch a while longer listening to the rain until he’s too cold in his wet clothes to sit still any longer. Then he goes inside and puts water in the dented kettle that’s sat on the stove for all of his life. Waits for its whistle. 

…

This is a story about Ronan Lynch. 

Here he is, bleeding out across a church pew. And here, bleeding in a women’s restroom. Here, standing still while the calves lip at his bare palms. Here, in the middle of a grove of trees. And here, crossing a tire-tracked field in November.

Let me set the scene. It’s an unusually cool November for mild Virginia. Record-setting rains. The back creek floods. The sun sets earlier and rises later, like black curtains bracketing the days. We’re almost done. 

It’s a Tuesday. Ronan spends the morning in his father’s little office, sifting through the last of the paperwork, drinking a very cold Diet Coke and dripping condensation onto feed invoices, handwritten To Do lists, dimensions for a treehouse Niall was always promising to build them. Most he discards. The treehouse plan he keeps. Some of the lists, too, where his father’s handwriting is too characteristically brash and scrawling to trash. 

It’s been slow work. Ronan changed the overhead lightbulb when it burned out. He patched the barn roof where the rain was getting in. He can’t quite conquer the dust—it rises in the air, clings to his clothes and follows him home—but he’s pried open the painted-shut window to let in new air, and that’s something. 

He’s received several emails from Henry Cheng about one of his environmental initiatives, the possibility of hosting experimental bee hives in one of his back fields— _ with much caution tape _ , Henry writes,  _ to keep out wandering Ganseymans (Ganseymen?) _ —and Ronan hasn’t answered yet, but he hasn’t trashed the email. And that’s something, too. 

The dust follows him back to the farmhouse where he eats lunch over the sink, standing amid the furniture he’s known all his life. 

His cleaning efforts haven’t quite reached the house yet; these are firmer hauntings. In death as in life, his mother is a quieter and more enduring presence. 

But he’s trying. He cleaned out his father’s office. He carved new notches into the pine where his father tracked their heights. He dug a hole in a back field and he laid down in it for a minute, and then he got up and filled it in again. He only goes to the graveyard on Tuesdays. 

He doesn’t linger today. The grass is wet from the morning’s rain and the gray sky promises another episode soon, and—unlike the Weekly Mourner, who is not deterred by snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night—Ronan doesn’t have an umbrella. So he makes his visits, promises Noah he’ll bring soda next time, and then he drives home in his father’s black BMW. 

…

Ronan pulls back down the driveway, thinking vaguely that he needs to trim the hedges before the rain starts again, needs to buy gasoline for the ATVs, needs to get the pieces of the motorcycle he’s building out of Gansey’s guest bedroom before Thanksgiving, needs to track down the barncat he calls WARMONGER and make sure her torn ear is healing okay after she fought a coyote—

And then, in the middle of all it, there’s Adam. 

Adam’s shitbox car is parked at the end of the driveway beneath the bare plum tree. Sitting on the car’s mismatched bumper is Adam, palms resting on his knees and just the same except a little less summer-brown. 

His legs kick out like he’s going to stand and then he doesn’t. Ronan parks the BMW and kills the engine and tries to empty himself of expectations, feeling charged and strange like he hasn’t since the night his brother punched him in the face. He slams the door.

“Hi,” says Adam, and it’s somehow a shock to look him in the face, as though Ronan forgot the precise arrangement of his features—bridge of nose meeting browbone, light hair touching the tops of his ears. 

“Jesus Christ,” he says with feeling.

“Nope,” Adam says. “Just me.” 

This is, impossibly, a joke. Ronan doesn’t laugh but his hands, fisted at his sides, come unclenched. The air smells damp and a little sour with wet leaves. 

“What, are you here to convert me? Bringing lost lambs back into the fold?”

“Just to talk,” Adam says. He slides off the car, puts his head a little to the side, looks at Ronan like he’s also experiencing that shock of mouth and eyes and nose. “You’d never pass for a lamb.”

Ronan is pleased despite himself. “You wanna come inside?”

Adam says, “Okay.”

The kitchen door isn’t locked ‘cause Ronan doesn’t bother much with things like that, but the damp air makes the door stick in its frame, so he has to ram it a bit with his shoulder to get it open. He feels a little better from the ramming. He steps aside and lets Adam in. 

He watches him survey the house, the careful movements of his eyes, the whorl of hair at the back of his head where his hair grows. 

It’s a bit cleaner, a bit less cluttered, but it’s also emptied of wedding guests and flowers and brothers. It’s just Ronan and the mismatched furniture, the cats who get inside when he’s not looking, the books his mother loved, the fireplace he can’t bully into functioning. 

Feeling strange and exposed and defensive, he says, “I’m cleaning it out a little.”

Adam looks back at him sharply. “You’re selling?”

“No,” he says. “Just trying to- live here.”

“Good,” says Adam, in a way Ronan can’t make sense of. A cat appears from somewhere and curls between their legs. 

Ronan, feeling explosive with a feeling he can’t name, steps over the cat to grab glasses, a carton of orange juice. Adam shrugs when he tilts the carton at him, so he pours two cups and feels the glass go cold and clammy under his palms. 

“Thanks,” Adam says. He stands at the kitchen table, watches Ronan where he leans against the counter. “How have you been?”

This makes Ronan want to laugh and also to tear something apart in his hands. He gulps his orange juice and tries to summon an answer, eventually just waves an arm around the kitchen in answer. 

“I don’t know, Adam, fuck that. You’re… here.” 

“I am,” Adam agrees. The cat leaps onto the table and he pets it carefully, face turned away. “Maybe Gansey told you. I left the seminary. I don’t think I would’ve been a very good priest.”

Ronan puts down his glass of orange juice. Adam tilts his head back to Ronan, smiles for the first time. 

“Aren’t you gonna say sorry? Everyone’s been saying  _ oh, I’m sorry  _ like somebody died.”

“I’m not fucking sorry,” Ronan says. He makes a jerky movement and then stops himself, startling the cat. “Are  _ you  _ sorry?”

“I don’t know,” Adam says in his thoughtful, cool way. He puts the cold glass of juice against his cheek like he’s testing its temperature. “I miss the feeling of purpose, mostly. Surrendering myself to it. It wasn’t what I wanted, but I’m not sure what I  _ do  _ want _ - _ I’m feeling sort of angry about it. I think I might be a sort of angry person, fundamentally.”

His mouth does something small, expressive, rueful. Ronan realizes—sudden and huge—how glad he is to see him. He wants to touch him, to have proof of him. Adam seems to understand; they meet in the middle of the kitchen, pause. 

“I’m an angry person, too,” Ronan says. “Fundamentally.”

“Are you?” Adam says thoughtfully. “I don’t know.”

Ronan laughs and the cat jumps off the table and they hug hard. Adam’s in the kitchen and Adam’s not becoming a priest and when he steps back, he gives Ronan an embarrassed smile. Knuckle touching the soft spot under his eye. 

“How’s Declan? And Matthew?”

Ronan finishes his juice. He tells Adam about Declan and Ashley’s nightmare honeymoon, how Declan’s luggage was lost on the plane and so he had to spend two weeks wearing novelty giftshop t-shirts instead of bespoke white linens. He tells him about Matthew’s rugby season and the work he’s been doing in his father’s office and the strange things he’s uncovered—impressionist paintings wrapped in brown paper, a headless carousel horse, a nest of baby white mice. 

Adam laughs in the right places. He asks intelligent questions. He puts his glass of juice on a catalogue so it won’t leave a moisture ring on Ronan’s mother’s table. He isn’t becoming a priest. 

“Gansey’s in Belize.” Ronan’s moved from the counter to sit opposite Adam at the kitchen table. Under the table, the cat curls between their legs. “With the bossy waitress who stole all that toilet paper.”

“Blue.” Adam props his chin on his knee, traces shapes into the condensation on his cup. “I’ve been talking with Gansey a bit. We’re experiencing similar crises. He wants me to work as a research assistant for him next semester while he looks for his dead king.”

“Is that what you want?” 

Adam waves a hand as if to swat this question away. “I don’t know. His advisor’s the oldest, absolute  _ oldest  _ man I’ve ever met.” 

“Mallory,” Ronan remembers with dislike, because in his brain he keeps a catalogue of rivals for Gansey’s attention and affection. 

“I’ve talked to him a bit about what I’m, you know, going to do with my life now that-“ 

Adam’s shoulder lifts, drops. Ronan wonders what his shrug means, if he’s sorry he left, if he still believes in God. Wonders why he drove the twisty road to the Barns and parked his car beneath the plum tree. But he doesn’t ask these questions because the answers feel huge and heady and dangerous. 

“Doing stuff with your life is capitalist bullshit,” he says. 

Adam makes a face. “Don’t talk about money with me. I’m happy to see you. Don’t ruin it.”

Ronan is pleased both at his reaction and his confession. Under the table, he kicks Adam lightly in the shin. “Want to see the cows?”

Adam does. A shuffle of putting glasses into the sink, finding muckboots for Adam, ushering the cat out the backdoor into the realization that it is raining again. November has brought nothing but rain and rain and now- Adam. 

Together they weave between puddles, shoulders knocking and then moving apart, coming together again. The rain is pressing Adam’s uneven hair down onto his forehead. Every time Ronan’s eyes land on him, he is looking back at him. And it is good. 

“It’s just the same,” Adam says, not with accusation or concern, but like he’s glad for this sameness. And that’s good, too. 

The cows have retreated from the rain into the barn. Ronan and Adam walk among them, wet, surrounded by the hot stink of wet animal. WARMONGER the cat leaps down from a windowsill, and Ronan chases her around until he can ascertain that her ear is healing okay. Adam watches with amusement and doesn’t offer to help, lets the cows come up close to him and nose at his brown wrists, at his rain-wet shirt. 

Ronan lets WARMONGER escape, satisfied with her healing process, and sinks down onto a stack of musty livestock blankets. He’s not wearing his leather bands, so he tucks a finger into the sleeve of his shirt and tugs. 

He asks, “How come you left?”

“That’s,” Adam looks up from an inquisitive calf, half-smiles, “not a very polite thing to ask.”

“I’m rude as shit,” Ronan agrees. He grins then because this is another quiet joke—a conversation they’ve already had—and the rain’s picking up and Adam’s here and he’s not becoming a priest. It’s the first moment he tips into believing, so he grins. “Fucking crass, even.”

“Maybe it was you,” Adam says. He has to raise his voice—light, warm—against the rain. 

Ronan shakes his head, loving him. “It wasn’t me.” 

“It was an act of God,” Adam says, and then when that doesn’t clear it up, “My roof caved in.”

“Your roof-“

“I mean it’s all very logical,” Adam says. “Between all the rain we’ve been having and that big moisture stain on my ceiling. But it felt like a sign.”

“A sign,” Ronan repeats. 

“Or,” he amends, “I took it as such.” 

WARMONGER makes a few suspicious circles around Adam and seems to dismiss him as a threat. She darts out into the rain in search of a worthier opponent. Adam rescues the hem of his t-shirt from the cow lipping at it. His hands move across the white fabric with the same elegant ceremony he held the monstrance. He shakes his head.

“Or maybe it didn’t mean anything at all, except that St. Agnes’ building codes aren’t up to standard. Maybe I was just looking for a reason to leave and God had nothing to do with it. But I asked for a sign and then my roof caved in on me while I was sleeping.”

“Maybe God’s a bastard,” Ronan says, “who likes caving in roofs.”

Adam turns out his palms, a gesture sort of between humor and helplessness. He looks like something off a prayer card, a saint tolerantly submitting himself to persecution, hands raised in surrender to some greater animation. 

“All I know is most of my shitty stuff is ruined and I have to decide what I want to do with my life now that it’s mine again. And I don’t have a calling or a purpose at all, except I guess to wake up every morning and ask  _ what do you want, Adam? What do you want? _ And today I woke up and I thought,  _ I want to see Ronan _ .”

Probably the cicadas should pick up. Probably the broken-down carousel in the back barn should start to turn. Probably Ronan’s nose should start to bleed like it did the night he met Adam in a parking lot _ .  _

But God doesn’t go in for big showy gestures much anymore, having mostly sworn off all the flooding and famine and tongues of flame a while back. So there’s just the drum of rain on the roof. The grumble of hot, wet life all around them. Ronan lifts one scarred-over wrist, stands. 

“Here I am.”

“Here you are,” Adam agrees, and when he crosses the barn to Ronan he is neither sainted nor untouchable.

…

It is a Tuesday, so Ronan goes to the graveyard. For once it’s not raining so he drives with the windows down, breathing in the almost-winter smell he’s known all his life. Cool air and dying things. The Henrietta hills are smudgy with smoke as farmers burn their stubbly fields, preparing for new things to grow among the dead things. 

The shitty gas station convenience store where he buys Noah’s soda is gearing up for Thanksgiving, selling waxy miniature pumpkins and crepe paper turkeys. Ronan considers a hideous balloon shaped like a pilgrim for a while, but doesn’t buy it. The Barns has already borne the indignity of decorations once this year; Ronan will dust and his brothers will be fucking grateful for it.

A whole terrible crowd is bearing in on the Barns for Thanksgiving—Ashley, Declan, Matthew, Gansey, Gansey’s bossy girlfriend, Gansey’s objectionably old thesis advisor, and of course Adam—but the dread that gripped him throughout August isn’t there anymore. There are empty beds and new tanks of gasoline for the ATVs. There are a hundred strange new relics of their father to show his brothers. Matthew has recently changed his major to architecture, despite his poor spatial awareness and abysmal grades in trigonometry, and he is determined to start work on the treehouse blueprints Niall drew out. 

There’s a new rope swing in the barn where Ronan broke his arm as a kid—erected after a morning episode of Adam’s What Do I Want From My Life Ennui, resolved only when Ronan asked, “Do you want to build a swing?” and Adam said, “You bastard, yes.” 

So Ronan doesn’t buy the stupid balloon, just a six-pack of Diet Coke and the toothpaste Adam asked for and a big yellow gourd that looks like a dick to leave on Noah’s grave, because that’s the kind of shit Noah found funny. 

Then he goes and sits in the graveyard for a while, watching the Weekly Mourner sob and groan and heave at a new gravestone, first thinking of Noah and then not thinking of much at all. His brain is quiet but he thinks Noah, for all his nervous chatter and undiagnosed ADHD, wouldn’t mind the silence. 

After the drunken night Ronan tried to kill himself, after finding him bloodied on a church pew, Noah was the only person who never made Ronan talk about it, who never asked Ronan unanswerable questions about  _ why  _ and  _ what’s wrong  _ and  _ how do we make it better.  _

Noah asked only once, a few days after, with eyes averted, “You won’t do it again?”

And Ronan said, with eyes averted, “No.”

And they never spoke about it again, returned to the small and delinquent traditions of their existence at Monmouth Manufacturing—parking lots and convenience stores and endless stupid tinkering with their summer-hot cars. Noah, kind and valorous as Gansey in his own scrubby way, asked no questions. He played self-destruction with Ronan and then he applied bandages when they finished. 

Ronan misses him. 

It’s an easy name for a big swollen feeling, for the sadness he feels when he thinks of all the things Noah doesn’t get to know—about the ATV ramp to the moon in the back pasture, about all the fucked-up colors Ronan’s bruises turned after attempting the ramp to the moon, about Adam’s genius for fixing cars and motorcycles and swollen doorframes, about the new little solar system of Adam and Gansey and Ronan and Blue, about how nicely the scars on Ronan’s arms have healed, have nearly faded completely. 

But today Ronan is content to sit quietly in the presence of all the things he knows. He’ll keep his promise; he won’t do it again. And there will be other Tuesdays to tell these stories. He swallows a mouthful of warm Diet Coke and empties the rest into the November-yellow grass beside Noah’s gravestone. 

When he stands to go, he leaves the rest of the six-pack of Coke on a bench for the Weekly Mourner, in case he gets dehydrated from all the crying. Ronan hasn’t learned to perform grief quite so gracefully yet, but he’s learning. 

He leaves the graveyard. 

…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No obscure Biblical references this time, only a sincere thank you for reading and for your patience!! This one took a long time to carve out, but hopefully it was worth the wait! This story has been my most dear and favorite thing for about 8 months now and to have people enjoy and respond to something as personal and self-indulgent as this has been a real joy!
> 
> Come say hi on [tumblr](https://charactershoesfic.tumblr.com) if you have questions/reactions or simply want an apology for turning a moisture stain into a metaphor for God bc that was a little presumptuous, wasn’t it?
> 
> Anyway leave a comment if you want :) I feel a little sad to be done, so maybe send me your faves lines and let me live in this story a little longer!! thank you again and stay well <3


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